Thought controlled devices are pretty primitive at this point. Sure, everyone from
Honda to the
U.S. Army (of course) is conducting research, but at this point we don’t have much to show for it all besides an evening of
experimental music in Prague. If the kids at Intel have their way, computers will soon be able to look at a person’s brain activity and determine actual words that they’re thinking. The idea here is that the activity generated in the average person by individual words can be mapped and stored in a database, to be matched against that of someone using the though control interface. So far, results have been promising — an early prototype exists that can differentiate between words like screwdriver, house, and barn, by using a magnetic resonance scanner that measures something like 20,000 points in the brain. Anything more effective than that, such as dictating letters or searching Google
with your mind alone is probably years in the future — though when it does come to pass we expect to see a marked increase in expletive-filled
liveblogs.
Intel’s mind reading computer could bring thought controlled interfaces to a whole new, frightening level originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Categories: Techno Freak Tags: brain, Intel, interface, magnetic resonance, magnetic resonance imaging, MagneticResonance, MagneticResonanceImaging, medicine, mind, MRI, research, science, thought control, ThoughtControl
Silk: it’s stronger than Kevlar, thinner than a human hair, it’s biocompatible (it doesn’t trigger human immune system response), and it’s produced by insects (although some new-fangled metabolically engineered bacteria seem to be up to the task). Researchers at Tufts University have created a silk and gold biosensor that can be implanted in the body to keep tabs on proteins and chemicals. One possible use would be to keep track of diabetic’s glucose levels, notifying the patient when things go wonky. At the present time, they’ve only tested the antenna itself — it was found to resonate at specific frequencies, even when implanted in several layers of muscle tissue (from a pig, mind you). For their next trick, the team will outfit the device with proteins or other molecules to monitor in-vivo chemical reactions.
Implantable antenna designed using silk and gold originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 19 Aug 2010 03:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Here’s an interesting one. Just years after a researcher in Japan realized that lasers could stimulate nerves, a professor of biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt University along with cohorts from Case Western Reserve have found that the same is true with the heart. By using an Infrared laser on an early embryonic heart, tests were able to show that the muscle was “in lockstep with the laser pulse rate.” The crew also found no signs of laser damage after a few hours of experimenting, though obviously more extensive research would be required before any medical agency allowed such a device to be beamed underneath a human chest. The hope here is that this discovery could one day lead to ultra-small, implantable pacemakers, or better still, to “pace an adult heart during surgery.” There’s nary a mention of when this stuff will actually be ready for FDA oversight, but there’s a downright creepy video of it all in the source link. Consider yourself warned.
Infrared laser shown to quicken heart rate, gives hope for ultra-small pacemakers originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 10:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Categories: Techno Freak Tags: Case Western Reserve, Case Western Reserve University, CaseWesternReserve, CaseWesternReserveUniversity, embryonic heart, EmbryonicHeart, heart, heart beat, heart rate, HeartBeat, HeartRate, infrared, IR, laser, medical, medicine, pace maker, pacemaker, science, university, vanderbilt