DARPA Project Starts Building Human Memory Prosthetics

The first memory-enhancing devices could be implanted within four years

Photo: Lawrence Livermore National LaboratoryRemember This? Lawrence Livermore engineer Vanessa Tolosa holds up a silicon wafer containing micromachined implantable neural devices for use in experimental memory prostheses.

“They’re trying to do 20 years of research in 4 years,” says Michael Kahana in a tone that’s a mixture of excitement and disbelief. Kahana, director of the Computational Memory Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, is mulling over the tall order from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In the next four years, he and other researchers are charged with understanding the neuroscience of memory and then building a prosthetic memory device that’s ready for implantation in a human brain.

DARPA’s first contracts under its Restoring Active Memory (RAM) program challenge two research groups to construct implants for veterans with traumatic brain injuries that have impaired their memories. Over 270,000 U.S. military service members have suffered such injuries since 2000, according to DARPA, and there are no truly effective drug treatments. This program builds on an earlier DARPA initiative focused on building a memory prosthesis, under which a different group of researchers had dramatic success in improving recall in mice and monkeys.

Kahana’s team will start by searching for biological markers of memory formation and retrieval. For this early research, the test subjects will be hospitalized epilepsy patients who have already had electrodes implanted to allow doctors to study their seizures. Kahana will record the electrical activity in these patients’ brains while they take memory tests.

“The memory is like a search engine,” Kahana says. “In the initial memory encoding, each event has to be tagged. Then in retrieval, you need to be able to search effectively using those tags.” He hopes to find the electric signals associated with these two operations.

Once they’ve found the signals, researchers will try amplifying them using sophisticated neural stimulation devices. Here Kahana is working with the medical device maker Medtronic, in Minneapolis, which has already developed one experimental implant that can both record neural activity and stimulate the brain. Researchers have long wanted such a “closed-loop” device, as it can use real-time signals from the brain to define the stimulation parameters.

Kahana notes that designing such closed-loop systems poses a major engineering challenge. Recording natural neural activity is difficult when stimulation introduces new electrical signals, so the device must have special circuitry that allows it to quickly switch between the two functions. What’s more, the recorded information must be interpreted with blistering speed so it can be translated into a stimulation command. “We need to take analyses that used to occupy a personal computer for several hours and boil them down to a 10-millisecond algorithm,” he says.

In four years’ time, Kahana hopes his team can show that such systems reliably improve memory in patients who are already undergoing brain surgery for epilepsy or Parkinson’s. That, he says, will lay the groundwork for future experiments in which medical researchers can try out the hardware in people with traumatic brain injuries—people who would not normally receive invasive neurosurgery.

The second research team is led by Itzhak Fried, director of the Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles. Fried’s team will focus on a part of the brain called the entorhinal cortex, which is the gateway to the hippocampus, the primary brain region associated with memory formation and storage. “Our approach to the RAM program is homing in on this circuit, which is really the golden circuit of memory,” Fried says. In a 2012 experiment, he showed that stimulating the entorhinal regions of patients while they were learning memory tasks improved their performance.

Fried’s group is working with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, to develop more closed-loop hardware. At Livermore’s Center for Bioengineering, researchers are leveraging semiconductor manufacturing techniques to make tiny implantable systems. They first print microelectrodes on a polymer that sits atop a silicon wafer, then peel the polymer off and mold it into flexible cylinders about 1 millimeter in diameter. The memory prosthesis will have two of these cylindrical arrays, each studded with up to 64 hair-thin electrodes, which will be capable of both recording the activity of individual neurons and stimulating them. Fried believes his team’s device will be ready for tryout in patients with traumatic brain injuries within the four-year span of the RAM program.

Outside observers say the program’s goals are remarkably ambitious. Yet Steven Hyman, director of psychiatric research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, applauds its reach. “The kind of hardware that DARPA is interested in developing would be an extraordinary advance for the whole field,” he says. Hyman says DARPA’s funding for device development fills a gap in existing research. Pharmaceutical companies have found few new approaches to treating psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders in recent years, he notes, and have therefore scaled back drug discovery efforts. “I think that approaches that involve devices and neuromodulation have greater near-term promise,” he says.

This article originally appeared in print as “Making a Human Memory Chip.”

ORIGINAL: IEES Spectrum

By Eliza Strickland

Posted 27 Aug 2014

Google launches ‘Made with Code’ initiative to encourage more girls to code, backed by $50m pledge

Google has announced that it will provide up to $50 million for organizations that can help encourage more girls to take an interest in computer science at an early age.

Revealed as part of its newly launched Made with Code initiative, the cash will be used for things like “rewarding teachers who support girls who take CS courses on Codecademy or Khan Academy,” Susan Wojcicki said in a blog post today.

Other aspects of the Made with Code scheme – which is also backed by other organizations like Girls Inc., Girl Scouts of the USA, MIT Media Lab and the National Center for Women & Information Technology, among others – include Blockly-based projects, like making a 3D printed bracelet, learning to create GIFs and “building beats” for a music track.

Google has put together a standalone site for the initiative too, so if you want to get involved you can head across there now.

➤ Things you love are Made with Code [Google]

Don’t miss: Codecademy, Google and DonorsChoose team up to get more girls studying Computer Science

Featured Image Credit – GEORGES GOBET/AFP/Getty Images

ORIGINAL: The Next Web

Sci-Fi Device Lets Men And Women Swap Bodies

Using virtual reality and neuroscience, this machine lets you see, hear, and even feel what it's like in another person's body. 

Happy Presidents Day! We're celebrating by revisiting some of our most popular stories of the year. Enjoy.

Talk about going on a gender bender.

A new machine created by a Spanish design collective combines virtual reality with advanced neuroscientific techniques to let men and women swap bodies with each other. Called The Machine To Be Another, it's all done in the hopes that body transference will help scientists explore and quantify concepts like sexism, gender identity, and bias.

Based in Barcelona, Be Another Lab is made up of Philippe Bertrand, Daniel Gonzalez Franco, Christian Cherene, and Arthur Pointea, a collection of interdisciplinary artists whose fields range from programming and electronic engineering to interactive system design and neuro-rehabilitation. Together, the goal of Be Another Lab is to explore the concepts of empathy through technology, science, and art.

In most neuroscience experiments that examine issues of empathy and bias, participants "trade places" with others using digital avatars. If a study wants to explore empathy for the handicapped, for example, scientists might sit subjects down in front of a computer and make them play a video game in which they are confined to a wheelchair, then ask them a series of questions about how the experience made them feel. But none of it is real.

Be Another Lab takes a different, more visceral approach to exploring empathy. Instead of using digital avatars, the group uses performers to copy the movements of a subject: for example, racial bias is studied by having a subject's actions mirrored by a performer of color.

"We believe this allows for a deeper experience for a user, knowing that their point of view is that of an actual human being, and not a virtual avatar," says Bertrand. "In the last year, we’ve observed that subjects tend to demonstrate empathetic feelings towards the performers they didn't have before. They say that the experience has raised their awareness about the performers' social conditions, that they were able to go 'deep into this other person's life.'" They say that the experience has raised their awareness.

With The Machine To Be Another, Bertrand and company have taken this approach to the next level by leveraging the tech of a paid Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. In the project, two participants stand in front of one another, and put on their headsets which allow them to effectively see out of one another's eyes. When they look at each other, they see themselves. When they speak, they hear the other person's voice in their ears.

 

But this isn't where the simulation ends. Working together, the two participants are encouraged to sync their movements, touching objects in the room, looking at things, and exploring their 'own' bodies simultaneously.

"The brain integrates different senses to create your experience of the world," explains Bertrand. "In turn, the information from each of these senses influences how the other senses are processed. We use these techniques from neuroscience to actually affect the psychophysical sensation of being in your body."

In other words, in combination with being fed video and sound from their partner's headset, by moving and touching things at the same time, the Machine To Be Another can actually convince people that they are in someone else's body as long as the two partners remain in sync.

It's a radical idea that Be Another Lab is only beginning to explore. Right now, their experiments have mostly focused on gender swapping, which the team hopes will also explore issues in regards to transgender and queer bias. The group is currently looking to partner with organizations, experts and activists to help them further perfect their techniques.

They say to truly understand someone, you have to walk a mile in their shoes. Thanks to the Machine To Be Another, you won't just walk that mile, you'll feel the blisters on the other person's feet.

ORIGINAL: FastCo Exist

Grab your brains: Stanford students give local seventh graders a day to remember

Stanford graduate students take human and animal brains into middle schools in Palo Alto and East Palo Alto.

Video by Kurt Hickman

Local middle school students learn hands-on about brains from Stanford neuroscience students.

On Monday, Feb. 3, Stanford neuroscience students Ivan Millan and Sammy Katta got to the lab early. They grabbed some brains – both human and animal – and set out for East Palo Alto.

It was Brain Day. They had work to do.

Millan and Katta are among a group of graduate students who take brains to local middle school classrooms throughout Palo Alto and East Palo Alto as part of a program started by neurobiology Professor William Newsome more than two decades ago, when his own kids were in middle school.

The program started in a single school but has since grown to a monthlong series of classroom visits to 10 local schools.

The goal, however, remains the same: to get kids excited about science. And brains.

"These middle school students will be tomorrow's scientists who might answer the questions our institute has set out to study," said Newsome, who is the director of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute. 

A day to remember

Veronica Woodard, who teaches biology to middle and high school students at East Palo Alto Phoenix Academy, energetically welcomed Katta and Millan. "It's my favorite day of the year," Woodard said. "Students get to see what we've been talking about in class. This solidifies the content I've been teaching."

It should be noted that Brain Day wouldn't be possible without people who donate their organs for research. At the start of class, Millan asked the students to be respectful of those who donated the brains they would be holding.

Then the fun began.

"It's light."

"They're kind of soft."

"It looks like plastic."

"It's wrinkly."

The human brains were all those things. In fact, before being preserved, the brains were even lighter and softer. And as for the wrinkles, they are part of what sets humans apart from other animals.

"Those wrinkles give more surface area for your brain to work," Millan said. Much like how a beach towel can be squeezed into a ball, the wrinkled human brain provides a larger surface for brain cells.

(Brains) of mice and men

At another table, Katta showed the students preserved brains from a variety of animals, including monkeys, rats, sheep, dogs and a turtle. Compared to human brains, the animal brains had a lot fewer wrinkles.

"Think about how smart the animals are and compare that to the size of the brain," Katta said. For animals with smaller, less wrinkly brains, thinking isn't their strength.

She also pointed out which part of the brain is responsible for smell. That region was small in the monkey brain, but much larger in that of the rat and the dog.

"You can tell what's important to an animal by looking at the brain," Katta said. "Dogs really like to smell."

Generating excitement

Katta says she likes volunteering for Brain Day because it helps get kids excited about science. "There are a lot of issues around us that involve science," she said. "I think this motivates kids to continue learning about science, and that knowledge and the skills they learn about how to think about the world around them are important regardless of what they do."

Woodard said the anticipation of seeing brains helps pique student interest in her lectures on the subject. "When I tell kids there's an opportunity for us to have brains in the classroom, the interest goes way up," she said.

And for some students, that interest really takes hold. Jordan Middle School teacher Terry Noeth received a letter from a former student heading to college to study physiology and neuroscience. The student wrote, "After adjusting to the awful smell of the brain slices, all I could think was: Woah. This strip of tissue used to be someone. This piece of brain used to think and love. I was so fascinated that I knew that when I grew up, I wanted to do something, anything, that related to the brain and how it makes us who we are."

Media Contact

Amy Adams, University Communications: (650) 796-3695 amyadams@stanford.edu

ORIGINAL: Stanford

By Amy Adams
February 6, 2014

In college at 12, off to start her Ph.D. at 16, Tigard's Tesca Fitzgerald blazes new intellectual territory

ORIGINAL: Oregon Live
By Betsy Hammond, The Oregonian
June 12, 2013

 

At age 16, Tesca Fitzgerald will graduate with honors Sunday from Portland State University and head to a prestigious computer science Ph.D. program. Those who know her well say she is unfailingly fun to be around and always likes to try new things, whether tap dance, a new route to the bus stop or stretching software past what its designers thought were the limits. (Beth Nakamura/The Oregonian) 

During her first week in college, in a discrete mathematics class at Portland Community College, Tesca Fitzgerald sat in the back of the room trying not to call attention to herself. A diligent student, she soon raised her hand and asked a question.

Every head in the room swiveled. Why such a childlike-voice in advanced college math?

The pint-size pony-tailed 12-year-old would go on to ace the class.

Now 16, the self-possessed teen from Tigard will graduate Sunday from Portland State University with honors in computer science. Oregon's six other public universities will hold graduations Saturday and Monday.

After being heavily wooed by several of the nation's top computer science programs, Fitzgerald is headed to Georgia Tech to earn her Ph.D. with a specialty in artificial intelligence.

Over and over, she has turned heads by quietly pushing the envelope to pull off intellectual feats. Explaining one of them, with a simplicity that explains many, she says, "It was because I wanted to do something different that nobody had done before."

With her degree and know-how, Fitzgerald could easily have scored a high-paying job at her choice of Portland firms. Most of her fellow C.S. majors have done just that.

Her desire to stretch exploration of human and artificial intelligence explains her plans to instead move 2,600 miles from the parents and sisters she adores to spend six years or more earning a doctorate.

She chose Georgia Tech because it offers a computer science specialty called interactive computing that will allow her to delve into cognitive science, neuroscience and other interdisciplinary arenas.

"My passion lies in finding new solutions to new problems," she says.

Her talent for computing showed early, thanks in part to an unusual home environment. Her parents, both with MBAs, worked at home a lot, half time for her trust-manager mom, Ami, full time for her self-taught database designer dad, Mark.
He had a lot of computers, enough that all three daughters could bang around on them from infancy and got one of their own as preschoolers.

One scene from a plane, as recalled by Ami Fitzgerald: When Tesca was not yet 2, she and her mother took a flight, each with her own laptop, unusual for a toddler in the 1990s. While Ami worked, Tesca played a simple interactive game, appearing to deftly use the computer as she sucked on her pacifier. Other passengers gaped.

At landing time, mother told daughter to shut down her computer, and she did. But Ami struggled to get hers off, even after she yanked out the battery pack. A flustered flight attendant insisted she shut it down.

From the back of the plane, a chorus of voices shouted: "Ask the baby." Fitzgerald passed the laptop to Tesca, who did, indeed, turn it off.

"The whole back of the plane erupted," Ami Fitzgerald says.

The program Tesca played was a Reader Rabbit game designed to teach 4- to 6-year-olds letters, sounds and words. Her parents assumed she was just enjoying the goofy graphics and punching random keys.

When older sister Tayt was 5, her teacher declared her ready to read and sent home easy picture books. On her first try, Tayt did well.

Tesca, not yet 3, said what any little sister might: "My turn." Then, to her mother's astonishment, "She read and read and read. Every book you could put in front of her, she could read."

At age 2, with help only from Reader Rabbit, she had cracked the code.

On trips to and from Tayt's school, Ami Fitzgerald would strap 3-year-old Tesca in her car seat and hand her second-grade books. The toddler greedily consumed them.

"That's when I realized, 'Huh, we're going to have an issue,'" Ami Fitzgerald says.

At age 8, a pony-tailed Tesca Fitzgerald made a chess move in a game against her big sister, Tayt. The two super-smart sisters went through high school, Portland Community College and Portland State University together. Both graduate Sunday, Tayt with a degree in English, Tesca with hers in computer science. Bob Ellis / The Oregonian / 2005

She was a successful certified trust and financial adviser with a full-time career. She had barely heard of home schooling and had no idea how to teach.

But super-bright Tayt was being bullied at school. Ultra-bright Tesca was so far off the charts no regular classroom would fit.

So Ami Fitzgerald became a home-schooling mom, a role she still plays for 13-year-old Tylise.

Tesca Fitzgerald has a prodigious ability to memorize, lightning-fast learning skills and a passion for cutting-edge computing, says her senior thesis adviser, associate computer science professor Bart Massey. But his star student says another factor helps explain her trajectory: robotics team.

With its zany atmosphere, novel challenges and reward for smart coding, robotics taught her how much fun she could have writing software as part of a team, she says.

Almost by chance, Tesca got to take part at age 5 in an organized robotics program that has thousands of mostly middle-school-age Oregonians building and programming rudimentary robots for table-top contests each year.

Tayt was invited to help form a team. Tesca tagged along. On Day One, the woman guiding the team asked Tesca, "Do you want to learn how to program the robot?" She never looked back.

"I was the lead programmer that year," she says. "I loved the challenge, and I kept coming back to try to take it to the next level." As a member of the FIRST LEGO League's Fire-breathing Rubber Duckies, she programmed robots for seven years, culminating when she led the Duckies to the world competition as a 13-year-old PCC student.

Teams receive identical, easy-to-program kits. Tesca, naturally, found unprecedented ways to do more.

Tesca Fitzgerald, left, then a 14-year-old community college student, took part in a state robotics competition with friends Amiel Patton-Hall and Jevon Streicher. "Tesca is extremely smart and it's a ball to have conversations with her," says Patton-Hall, who took college physics at PSU with Fitzgerald this year. Randy Rasmussen/The Oregonian/2011 One year a new programmable box was introduced, with room to give the robot only five series of moves because the visual programming language took up so much space.

After reading 100 pages of technical background, Tesca found an out: She would write lots of programs to direct the robot's movements in plain text programs that take up little room. She would write only one program in the bulky built-in visual language -- one that could translate her text commands into the visual programming that was the only language the robot could understand.

Her team advanced to the international meet but was nearly disqualified there, Ami Fitzgerald says. "They didn't think a 10-year-old could do that work. It was such a unique concept, even the (organizers) had never thought of it and were sure a grown-up must have come up with it."

But the teen confidently made her case to 15 dubious adults. It helped that she is an unusually poised public speaker who has, among other things, helped keynote a major Google science fair event in New York City. Even so, she was asked to submit to a software exam and show her transcript before they relented.

Two years later, she reached her mini-robot zenith: She spent 600-plus hours to write and perfect a complex artificial intelligence code so the robot could make its own decisions and operate itself. Designers of the robotics program flew in from Europe and talked to her for hours about how she pushed their software beyond what any had imagined possible.

"These adults learned from someone who had tested their software to the absolute limit," Ami Fitzgerald says.

Massey, the honors thesis adviser, says Tesca Fitzgerald is still enlightening her elders. The speed, versatility and creativity she's exhibited in creating a program to test-drive user interfaces, researching machine learning logarithms and other projects have wowed people more than twice her age, he says.

"That's how it should be with your best undergraduates. By the end, they're teaching you stuff."

--Betsy Hammond

Does passing a small current through your brain really make you smarter?

ORIGINAL: Singularity Hub

Want to be smarter, solve difficult puzzles, learn the piano in half the time? All you need is a little shock. A growing number of scientists are claiming that passing a small current through the brain increases our aptitude. One need only to strap on the headgear, press the button, and sit back while mediocrity is zapped from your brain.

The ‘miracle’ boost is supposedly delivered through what’s called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). The stimulation is a steady current of 2 mA delivered through electrodes worn on the head and arm. The mild electric current is enough to depolarize neurons in the cerebral cortex and supposedly make it more receptive to new input. That is, the brain is primed to learn more easily.

At first blush this might sound more like psuedoscience than science. But several studies have shown that people learn faster with the battery strapped to their heads, giving new meaning to getting “the juices flowing.”

Last year scientists at the Mind Research Network in Albuquerque, New Mexico tested the ability of tDCS to improve people’s performance on a threat identification task. Participants were trained on the virtual reality simulation DARWARS AMBUSH! that the US military uses to train soldiers how to recognize and react to enemy ambushes and improvised explosive devices (IEDs). A baseline performance level was assessed, followed by a 1-hour training session, then a post-training test session in which participants were asked whether or not a threat was present. One group of participants received 2 mA tDCS for the first half and hour of the training session while another group received a meager 0.1 mA dose as a negative control.

tDCS enhanced participants’ ability to identify threats in the simulation game DARWARS AMBUSH!

Turns out that tDCS enhances training. The high dose group performed better at threat identification than the the group with the low dose. The enhanced performance is also accompanied by an altered state of awareness. “The number one thing I hear people say after tDCS is that time passed unduly fast,” lead scientist of the study, Michael Weisend, told New Scientist. They feel more focused and calm, he says, and their performance certainly makes it seem as though they were.

Previous studies show similar results. A 2005 study showed tDCS improved working memory, and a 2008 study showed tDCS improved language learning. A third study published earlier this year showed that tDCS delivered to the parietal cortex, a part of the brain through which visual information flows, enhanced visual short-term memory compared to placebo.

So if the effects are real, what are the 2 mA of current doing to the brain? Weisend and colleagues have tried to answer that question with brain imaging.

The brain’s magnetic field changes in response to sensory stimulation such as with sound, touch and light. With magnetoencelography (MEG) Weisend’s group showed that response magnetic fields of individuals who had received tDCS had amplitudes six times greater than baseline amplitudes. By contrast, individuals who had received a mock tDCS that gave the same sensation (it tingles) showed no boost over baseline. Furthermore, the tDCS group still showed a 2.5-fold boost in their magnetic fields 50 minutes after stimulation.

Trying to uncover anatomical changes, the group then conducted a study using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) scans that can visualize the white matter fiber tracts connecting different parts of the brain. DTI showed clear changes in brain structure only five days following stimulation. White matter nerve fiber tracts were “more robust and more highly organized” in the hemisphere which had received tDCS. In contrast, the side of the brain that did not receive stimulation showed no structural changes in the white matter.

Anyone who pays attention to the neuroscience of cognitive performance research might be reminded of the studies that tried to unlock they mystery of “the zone,” that Zen-like mental state that athletes seem to achieve for a time to elevate their performance head and shoulders above their peers. Except it wasn’t called the zone back in the seventies when the research began. It was called the similarly enigmatic “flow.”

The Hungarian psychologist and pioneer into “flow” research, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, performed EEG brain recordings on world class chess players engaged in a game. The recordings showed decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain nicknamed the “CEO of the brain” for its role in higher cognitive processes such as analysis and abstract thought. Csikszentmihalyi surmised that the decreased prefrontal activity during high level chess play suppressed self doubt and allowed a more unguarded, automatic type of performance.

More recently, in 2010, Chris Berka, co-founder of Advanced Brain Monitoring performed EEG scans on professional golfers and Olympic archers. The scans showed that, in the moments before hitting a golf ball or firing off an arrow, the athletes’ brains produced more alpha waves. The alpha waves are produced by the aggregate activity of all the brain’s neurons. Alpha waves have also been shown to be associated with decreased activity in the cortex so that, as Csikszentmihalyi thought, distracting thoughts could be tamped down to make way for physical command made intuitive through extensive practice. “We think this represents focused attention on the target, while other sensory inputs are suppressed,” Berka told the New Scientist. The alpha spike was more pronounced in experts compared to novices as if the long term nurturing of the high-performance alpha waves yield more reward when uncovered. One might think it the brain scan imagery for Timothy Gallwey’s“The Inner Game of Tennis.”

The Focus v1 awaits FDA approval in the US.

No matter what it’s called, it should come as no surprise that companies are already straining their own intellect to find ways to market devices that unleash our mental potential between a pair of electrical leads. The Focus v1 is a transcranial direct current stimulator that looks like a headband. Worn above the temples, the v1 delivers 2 mA of tDCS current for “enhanced concentration.” tDCS – or the Focus v1 – is not recognized by the FDA as a treatment and thus is not available in the US. But the v1 appears to be available outside the US.

So, with tDCS, will psychologist Anders Ericsson’s 10,000 hour rule, that asserts as many hours of practice is required before expertise is achieved, need to be revised? New version: 10,000 hours, or 5,000 with a steady flow of 2 mA current flowing through your skull.

While not yet approved by the FDA, the US Air Force is certainly giving tDCS its stamp of approval. At this year’s Society for Neuroscience meeting, Air Force Research Laboratory scientists reported that they’ve been using tDCS to cut down on the time needed to train drone pilots how to identify targets in radar images. Apparently training pilots to pick out targets within the complex images is a major rate-limiting step in being able to deploy the attack drones. As with the DARWARS AMBUSH! simulation training, performance improved with just 30 minutes of 2 mA stimulation. And not only did the tDCS help pilots learn faster, they retained their new skills longer too. Target identification accuracy typically drops at 20 minutes after training. Pilots who had trained with tDCS retained high accuracy up to 40 minutes after training.

The number of studies that explore the cognitive effects of tDCS is still admittedly low. And it is certainly possible that the 2 mA current flowing through the cortex doesn’t rewire the brain to think better or make our neurons more receptive to input. It could just be, Ramon y Cajal forbid, that zapping your brain just makes you more alert because, well, it kinda hurts. Coffee enhances our cognitive prowess by making us more alert (and as long as we’re careful, without the hurt). Could the secret of tDCS be that simple? Where there’s a possible breakthrough – and a possible market – brain researchers and companies are sure to go. My guess is that if the explanation has more to do with attentiveness than acumen, the researchers will be disappointed. The companies, not so much.

Scientists develop remote control system for cockroaches

ORIGINAL: GizMag

By Ben Coxworth

September 5, 2012

One of the 'backpack'-equipped remote-control Madagascar hissing cockroaches

The NCSU team has already successfully used the technology to guide cockroaches along curved lines on the floor

Much to the annoyance of home-owners everywhere, cockroaches are amazingly tough, and they’re able to squeeze into remarkably small spaces. These are some of the same qualities that researchers would like to see in tiny reconnaissance robots that could perform tasks such as searching earthquake-damaged buildings for survivors. Such adaptable, robust mini-robots would be quite challenging to create, however. A team of scientists from North Carolina State University are working on an alternative – sensor-equipped real cockroaches that are remotely controlled by human operators.

The project is being led by Alper Bozkurt, an assistant professor of electrical engineering. His team has fitted Madagascar hissing cockroaches with “backpacks” containing an inexpensive, lightweight, commercially-available chip, along with a wireless receiver and transmitter, and a microcontroller.

That microcontroller is wired into the cockroach’s antennae and cerci. Located in the abdomen, the cerci are sensory organs that detect air movement in order to warn of possible approaching predators. When the cerci are instead stimulated by the microcontroller, the result is the same as it would normally be – the cockroach thinks that something is coming at it from behind, and scuttles forward.

In order to direct that forward movement, either one of the antennae are stimulated. Ordinarily, they’re activated when they brush against unyielding objects, letting the cockroach know that it can’t move in that direction. In this case, when the stimulation comes not from an object but from a small electrical charge, the insect still reacts by changing course.

The microcontroller also monitors the interface between the cockroach's tissue and the implanted electrodes that deliver the charges, in order to avoid neural damage.

While it still may be some time before cyborg roaches bearing tiny cameras or other devices possibly powered by implantable biofuel cells become commonplace, Bozkurt’s team has already successfully used the technology to guide cockroaches along curved lines on the floor. Some of the trials can be seen in the video below.

Source: North Carolina State University

Graphic Adventure

Graphic Adventure

Ciencia en Canoa lanza su nuevo álbum llamado Graphic Adventure, una compilación de imágenes que seguro sacaran algunas sonrisas y serán un renacimiento a la conciencia.

Aquí está la visión blog de estas imágenes, aún en construcción http://graphic-adventure.blogspot.com