Pacific Grove, California--Pop a few human stem cells into culture, provide the right molecular signals, and before long a mock cerebral cortex or a cerebellum knockoff could be floating in the medium. These neural, or brain, organoids, typically just a few millimeters across, are not "brains in a dish," as some journalists have described them. But they are becoming ever more sophisticated and true to life, capturing more of the brain's cellular and structural intricacy. "It's surprising how far this [area] has advanced in the last year," says John Evans, a sociologist at the University of California San Diego who follows the research and public opinions on it. That progress has allowed researchers to delve deeper into how the human brain develops, functions, and goes awry in diseases, but it has also sharpened ethical questions.

It's not often that a twitching, snowman-shaped blob of 3D human tissue makes someone's day. But when Dr. Sergiu Pasca at Stanford University witnessed the tiny movement, he knew his lab had achieved something special. You see, the blob was evolved from three lab-grown chunks of human tissue: a mini-brain, mini-spinal cord, and mini-muscle. Each individual component, churned to eerie humanoid perfection inside bubbling incubators, is already a work of scientific genius. But Pasca took the extra step, marinating the three components together inside a soup of nutrients.

Super Micro Computer, Inc. (SMCI), a global leader in compute, storage, networking technologies and green computing today announced the general availability of its SuperServer solutions optimized for NVIDIA Tesla P100 accelerators with the new Pascal GPU architecture. Supermicro's innovative and GPU optimized single root complex PCI-E design is proven to dramatically improve GPU peer-to-peer communication efficiency over QPI and PCI-E links, with up to 21% higher QPI throughput and 60% lower latency compared to previous generation products. "Our high-performance computing solutions enable deep learning, engineering, and scientific fields to scale out their compute clusters to accelerate their most demanding workloads and achieve fastest time-to-results with maximum performance-per-watt, per-square-foot, and per-dollar," said Charles Liang, President and CEO of Supermicro. "With our latest innovations incorporating the new NVIDIA P100 GPUs, our customers can accelerate their applications and innovations to solve the most complex real world problems." "Supermicro's new high-density servers are optimized to fully leverage the new NVIDIA Tesla P100 accelerators to provide enterprise and HPC customers with an entirely new level of computing horsepower," said Ian Buck, General Manager of the Accelerated Computing Group at NVIDIA.