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Brain implant bypasses damaged nerves
CHRIS RANK/WPN
Technology DIRECT FROM BRAIN TO MUSCLE
IF ONLY it had come sooner. An online listing of the provenance of Chinese foods is being created that might have contained the recent melamine-in-milk scandal. ChinaTrace, a joint venture between the Shandong Institute of Standardization in China and TraceTracker of Oslo, Norway, will create electronic “food passports” stating how ingredients of foods for export were sourced and what, if any, tests they have undergone. While technologies to track food through the supply chain will probably be welcome, without regulation, the industry is unlikely to be cleaned up. Fang Shi Min, founder of New Threads, a website that exposes fraud and corruption in China, says milk adulteration has been a problem for at least 10 years, first with urea and now melamine. “It’s widely practised and an open secret,” he says.
–Is the message getting through?–
220 thousand yen ($2200). What it costs to rent HAL, a mobility-enhancing robotic exoskeleton, for a month in Japan
Lowering the tone saves lives
SOURCE: AP
‘Food passports’ track tainted grub
colleagues at the Washington National Primate Research Center in Seattle have developed a technique that could allow people to regain control of their own limbs, without the need for complex decoding algorithms (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature07418). Their idea was to tap individual motor cortex neurons, rather than groups of them, and route control signals directly to muscles. To test this, they fitted two macaques with implants that had 12 independently moveable 50-micrometre-wide electrodes. They then anaesthetised the nerves supplying the muscles in the macaques’ wrists, and fed the signals from the implant directly to electrodes attached to the muscles. Despite the nerve block, the monkeys were able to tense these muscles as they tried to reach for a tasty reward.
SMOKE alarms would save more lives if the noise they made was a little less shrill. So say Dorothy Bruck and her colleagues at Victoria University in St Albans, Australia. They played nine different alarm sounds to adults in the early part of their sleep. Most fire-related deaths at home, whether the houses have smoke alarms or not, happen in
the first 3 hours of slumber, when people are sleeping most deeply. The team found that people woke fastest when exposed to a square-wave signal with a fundamental frequency of 520 hertz plus some other low tones. Higher-pitched “pure” tones were least effective. The work will appear in the Journal of Sleep Research. Earlier research by the team suggests that square-wave tones are best for waking older adults, children and people who have been drinking.
GIZMO
R U THERE? Social network Bebo is beaming radio telescope signals from Ukraine to an Earth-like planet
Having commissioned development of flying robotic “insects” and self-driving cars, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has announced its latest unlikely-sounding project: a submersible aircraft. DARPA wants the eight-seater plane to be able to land in international waters, then dive and travel at least 12 miles to shore (tinyurl.com/4vfgu5). Making a fuselage that’s thin and light enough to fly, yet tough enough to resist pressures under water, will be the major challenge, DARPA says.
501 drawings, photos and text messages Gliese 581c 20 light years away
SOURCE: BBC
People paralysed by spinal injuries may one day be helped by brain implants that can seek out and detect the firing of single neurons. In an experiment on monkeys, the implants have restored muscle control to animals that had been temporarily paralysed with anaesthetic. A spinal injury or stroke can cause paralysis by blocking signals from the motor cortex to the muscles it controls. Despite the injury, the motor cortex’s neurons remain active, and experiments in other monkeys have shown that it is possible to decode the signals generated by bunches of neurons and use them to control computer cursors and robotic arms. Unfortunately, the algorithms required to do the decoding have required considerable development and computing power. Now physiologist Chet Moritz and
The University of Cambridge has developed a pill on a string that, when swallowed, expands into a sponge in your stomach. When gently pulled out, its takes a swab of the oesophagus as it travels back up. This will allow cancerous oesophageal cells to be detected without an uncomfortable endoscopy, says inventor Rebecca Fitzgerald.
“I have 100,000 separate sensations per second”
The online chatbot Elbot tells New Scientist how it feels to win the 2008 Loebner prize for fooling the most judges into thinking it is human. But none of the entrants passed the Turing test by convincing 30 per cent of the judges, and many were scarcely better that Eliza, the first 1960s chatbot
www.newscientist.com
18 October 2008 | NewScientist | 23
Technology DIRECT FROM BRAIN TO MUSCLE
IF ONLY it had come sooner. An online listing of the provenance of Chinese foods is being created that might have contained the recent melamine-in-milk scandal. ChinaTrace, a joint venture between the Shandong Institute of Standardization in China and TraceTracker of Oslo, Norway, will create electronic “food passports” stating how ingredients of foods for export were sourced and what, if any, tests they have undergone. While technologies to track food through the supply chain will probably be welcome, without regulation, the industry is unlikely to be cleaned up. Fang Shi Min, founder of New Threads, a website that exposes fraud and corruption in China, says milk adulteration has been a problem for at least 10 years, first with urea and now melamine. “It’s widely practised and an open secret,” he says.
–Is the message getting through?–
220 thousand yen ($2200). What it costs to rent HAL, a mobility-enhancing robotic exoskeleton, for a month in Japan
Lowering the tone saves lives
SOURCE: AP
‘Food passports’ track tainted grub
colleagues at the Washington National Primate Research Center in Seattle have developed a technique that could allow people to regain control of their own limbs, without the need for complex decoding algorithms (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature07418). Their idea was to tap individual motor cortex neurons, rather than groups of them, and route control signals directly to muscles. To test this, they fitted two macaques with implants that had 12 independently moveable 50-micrometre-wide electrodes. They then anaesthetised the nerves supplying the muscles in the macaques’ wrists, and fed the signals from the implant directly to electrodes attached to the muscles. Despite the nerve block, the monkeys were able to tense these muscles as they tried to reach for a tasty reward.
SMOKE alarms would save more lives if the noise they made was a little less shrill. So say Dorothy Bruck and her colleagues at Victoria University in St Albans, Australia. They played nine different alarm sounds to adults in the early part of their sleep. Most fire-related deaths at home, whether the houses have smoke alarms or not, happen in
the first 3 hours of slumber, when people are sleeping most deeply. The team found that people woke fastest when exposed to a square-wave signal with a fundamental frequency of 520 hertz plus some other low tones. Higher-pitched “pure” tones were least effective. The work will appear in the Journal of Sleep Research. Earlier research by the team suggests that square-wave tones are best for waking older adults, children and people who have been drinking.
GIZMO
R U THERE? Social network Bebo is beaming radio telescope signals from Ukraine to an Earth-like planet
Having commissioned development of flying robotic “insects” and self-driving cars, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has announced its latest unlikely-sounding project: a submersible aircraft. DARPA wants the eight-seater plane to be able to land in international waters, then dive and travel at least 12 miles to shore (tinyurl.com/4vfgu5). Making a fuselage that’s thin and light enough to fly, yet tough enough to resist pressures under water, will be the major challenge, DARPA says.
501 drawings, photos and text messages Gliese 581c 20 light years away
SOURCE: BBC
People paralysed by spinal injuries may one day be helped by brain implants that can seek out and detect the firing of single neurons. In an experiment on monkeys, the implants have restored muscle control to animals that had been temporarily paralysed with anaesthetic. A spinal injury or stroke can cause paralysis by blocking signals from the motor cortex to the muscles it controls. Despite the injury, the motor cortex’s neurons remain active, and experiments in other monkeys have shown that it is possible to decode the signals generated by bunches of neurons and use them to control computer cursors and robotic arms. Unfortunately, the algorithms required to do the decoding have required considerable development and computing power. Now physiologist Chet Moritz and
The University of Cambridge has developed a pill on a string that, when swallowed, expands into a sponge in your stomach. When gently pulled out, its takes a swab of the oesophagus as it travels back up. This will allow cancerous oesophageal cells to be detected without an uncomfortable endoscopy, says inventor Rebecca Fitzgerald.
“I have 100,000 separate sensations per second”
The online chatbot Elbot tells New Scientist how it feels to win the 2008 Loebner prize for fooling the most judges into thinking it is human. But none of the entrants passed the Turing test by convincing 30 per cent of the judges, and many were scarcely better that Eliza, the first 1960s chatbot
www.newscientist.com
18 October 2008 | NewScientist | 23