[TECH NEWS] Artificial intelligence has been the inspiration for countless books and movies, as well as the aspiration of countless scientists and engineers. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have now taken a major step toward creating artificial intelligence—not in a robot or a silicon chip, but in a test tube. The researchers are the first to have… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] Researchers at Columbia Univ. Medical Center have discovered the biological mechanism behind age-related loss of muscle strength and identified a drug that may help reverse this process. Their findings were published in the online edition of Cell Metabolism. As we grow older, our skeletal muscles tend to wither and weaken, a phenomenon known as sarcopenia. Sarcopenia, which begins… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] Yale University researchers can’t tell you where you left your car keys — but they can tell you why you can’t find them. A new study published July 27 in the journal Nature shows that the neural networks in the brains of the middle-aged and elderly have weaker connections and fire less robustly than in youthful ones. Intriguingly,… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] University of Manchester, UK scientists have taken a key step towards producing a high-performance computer which aims to create working models of human brain functions. Chips based on ARM processor technology will be linked together to simulate the highly-complex workings of the brain, whose functionality derives from networks of billions of interacting, highly-connected neurons. The chips upon which… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] A brain implant developed at the University of Michigan uses the body’s skin like a conductor to wirelessly transmit the brain’s neural signals to control a computer, and may eventually be used to reactivate paralyzed limbs. The implant is called the BioBolt, and unlike other neural interface technologies that establish a connection from the brain to an external… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] Imagine dropping dish soap into a sink full of greasy water. What happens? As soon as the soap hits the water, the grease recoils—and retreats to the edges of the sink. Now, what if the sink was a cancer cell, the globs of grease were cancer-promoting proteins and the dish soap was a potential drug? According to new… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] The use of positron emission tomography (PET) imaging may help identify findings in brain tissue associated with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), according to two articles published Online First July 11 by Archives of Neurology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. As scientists seek to understand more about AD and other forms of dementia, they are exploring the use of PET,… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] Peter Carr, a bioengineer at MIT Media Lab who is part of the group developing the technology, describes it as “highly directed evolution”. It is a strange combination of clumsiness and beauty. Sitting on a cheap-looking worktop is a motley ensemble of flasks, trays and tubes squeezed onto a home-made frame. Arrays of empty pipette tips wait expectantly…. Read more »
[WEB EXCLUSIVE] By Mike Perry Review of God Is Technology: How the Singularity of Monotheism Transcended Biology and Primed the Technological Genesis of God by Mitchell Heisman, from Suicide Note, http://www.suicidenote.info/ebook/suicide_note.pdf, pp. 32-358 (2010), accessed Dec. 6, 2010. Mitchell Heisman, a self-styled sociobiological scholar with a degree in psychology, labored five years on a treatise running to some 1,900 pages,… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] New neurons take more than six months to mature in adult monkeys and that time is likely even longer in humans, according to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, the University of Illinois, and Pennsylvania State University. Their findings, reported this week in the online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,… Read more »
