Intel: Chips in brains will control computers by 2020

By the year 2020, you won't need a keyboard and mouse to control your computer, say Intel Corp. researchers. Instead, users will open documents and surf the Web using nothing more than their brain waves. Scientists at Intel's research lab in Pittsburgh are working to find ways to read and harness human brain waves so they can be used to operate computers, television sets and cell phones. The brain waves would be harnessed with Intel-developed sensors implanted in people's brains.

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Demonstrating a CO2 Recycler

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have successfully demonstrated a prototype machine that uses the sun's energy to convert water and carbon dioxide into the molecular building blocks that make up transportation fuels. The "Sunshine to Petrol" system could ultimately prove a practical way to recycle CO₂ from power and industrial plants into gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, assuming the process can become at least twice as efficient as natural photosynthesis.

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Children With Autism Use Alternative Keyboard To Communicate With Their Families And Their World

Scientists at Project Blue Skies are enabling autistic children to communicate and explore the online world using the color-coded OrbitTouch keyboard, which allows users to input letters, symbols, and commands using a video-game-like interface (less distracting than a keyboard and does not require finger motion).

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Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool

Windows 7 can be installed from a USB stick, a much needed functionality for netbooks that don't have CD/DVD drives. You need a 4GB or larger USB drive and the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool from Microsoft. This tool creates a bootable iso image and if your computer BIOS supports, can be booted from the USB drive.

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Muscle-Bound Computer Interface

Forearm electrodes could enable new forms of hands-free computer interaction. Researchers at Microsoft, the University of Washington in Seattle, and the University of Toronto in Canada have come up with another way to interact with computers: a muscle-controlled interface that allows for hands-free, gestural interaction.

A band of electrodes attach to a person's forearm and read electrical activity from different arm muscles. These signals are then correlated to specific hand gestures, such as touching a finger and thumb together, or gripping an object tighter than normal. The researchers envision using the technology to change songs in an MP3 player while running or to play a game like Guitar Hero without the usual plastic controller.

Muscle-based computer interaction isn't new. In fact, the muscles near an amputated or missing limb are sometimes used to control mechanical prosthetics. But, while researchers have explored muscle-computer interaction for nondisabled users before, the approach has had limited practicality. Inferring gestures reliably from muscle movement is difficult, so such interfaces have often been restricted to sensing a limited range of gestures or movements. The new muscle-sensing project is "going after healthy consumers who want richer input modalities," says Desney Tan, a researcher at Microsoft. As a result, he and his colleagues had to come up with a system that was inexpensive and unobtrusive and that reliably sensed a range of gestures.

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GE Introduces Handheld Ultrasound Device

At the Web 2.0 Summit on Tuesday, GE CEO Jeff Immelt showed off a forthcoming hand-held ultrasound device called Vscan, calling it "the stethoscope of the 21st century." The device, which features a clam-shell design, with a small screen on one side and a circular input pad on the other, accepts a cable terminated in an ultrasound sensor. It could easily be mistaken for a cell phone. Immelt didn't provide any pricing information. He described the device as being digitally capable, despite it's lack of WiFi connectivity.

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Free will is not an illusion after all

Champions of free will, take heart. A landmark 1980s experiment that purported to show free will doesn't exist is being challenged.

In 1983, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet asked volunteers wearing scalp electrodes to flex a finger or wrist. When they did, the movements were preceded by a dip in the signals being recorded, called the "readiness potential". Libet interpreted this RP as the brain preparing for movement.

Crucially, the RP came a few tenths of a second before the volunteers said they had decided to move. Libet concluded that unconscious neural processes determine our actions before we are ever aware of making a decision.

Since then, others have quoted the experiment as evidence that free will is an illusion – a conclusion that was always controversial, particularly as there is no proof the RP represents a
decision to move.

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Cracking The Brain's Numerical Code: Researchers Can Tell What Number A Person Has Seen

By carefully observing and analyzing the pattern of activity in the brain, researchers have found that they can tell what number a person has just seen. They can similarly tell how many dots a person has been presented with, according to a report published online on September 24th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

These findings confirm the notion that numbers are encoded in the brain via detailed and specific activity patterns and open the door to more sophisticated exploration of humans' high-level numerical abilities...

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Vote for ideas in Project 10 to the 100

Project 10¹⁰⁰ is a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible. Thousands of people from more than 170 countries submitted more than 150,000 ideas. During the review process, 16 "big ideas" are distilled and each are inspired by numerous individual submissions. You can vote to realize one of them here. Voting ends on October 8, 2009.

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Predicting Drug Response from Brain Waves

Brain waves measured using a simple device just one week into treatment can indicate whether a depressed patient should continue taking a medication or be switched to another. The study, which was conducted at nine sites across the U.S., could significantly reduce the time it takes to effectively treat major depression.

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Luxury Bed Maker Hästens Introduces Mindspa iPhone Application

Hästens, the luxury bed maker from Sweden, and NeuroTech, Inc., announced the introduction of the new MindSpa application for the iPhone™ and iPod Touch™, the most recent technological extension of the company’s expertise in the field of sleep and relaxation. The MindSpa application takes the unique capabilities of the iPhone™ and iPod Touch™ to a new level by simultaneously providing auditory and visual neural brainwave entrainment with biofeedback. This is the first iPhone™ application to combine three scientifically proven modalities to provide deep relaxation leading to a calmer mind and better sleep.

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Memories Exist Even When Forgotten

New research by UC Irvine neuroscientists suggests the memory exists – you simply can't retrieve it. scientists discovered that a person's brain activity while remembering an event is very similar to when it was first experienced, even if specifics can't be recalled.

"If the details are still there, hopefully we can find a way to access them," said Jeff Johnson, postdoctoral researcher at UCI's Center for the Neurobiology of Learning & Memory and lead author of the study, appearing Sept. 10 in the journal Neuron.

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Magnetic levitation applied to a mammal

With the aid of a strong magnetic field, mice have been made to levitate for hours at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. The floating rodents could provide a valuable insight into how astronauts are affected by extended spells in zero gravity.

The effects on the health of an animal spending hours or days in such an intense magnetic field are unknown, though rats subjected to a field of 9.4 teslas – just over half as strong as the one used on the mice – suffered no obvious ill effects.

This system is too small to be used on people, but could you build something similar to levitate humans one day? "Theoretically I think you could," says inventor, "but the cost would be prohibitive."

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'Gene cure' for colour blindness

Scientists say they are a step closer to curing colour blindness using gene therapy. A US team were able to restore full colour vision to adult monkeys born without the ability to distinguish between the colours red and green. Nature journal describes the technique used by the researchers at the University of Washington. Although more studies are needed, the same treatment may work for humans who are colour blind, experts believe.

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Humans Glow in Visible Light

The human body, especially the face, emits "ultraweak photons" in visible light that varies during the day and is 1,000 times less intense than the levels to which our naked eyes are sensitive, Tohoku Institute of Technology researchers have found.

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TEDMED

This year TEDMED conference will be in on 27-30 October 2009 in San Diego, CA. TEDMED celebrates conversations that demonstrate the intersection and connections between all things medical and healthcare related: from personal health to public health, devices to design and Hollywood to the hospital. Together, this encompasses more than twenty percent of our GNP in America while touching everyone's life around the globe.

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Optogenetics - a new technology that combines genetic engineering, lasers, neurology and surgery

The best current technology for hard-to-treat disorders can get a difficult direct neural treatment called Deep Brain Stimulation, or DBS. An electrode is inserted down to the area associated with the disorder being treated and left in place. After the surgery has healed, the implant pulses current at a frequency that either activates or quiets the area responsible for the condition. Affecting cells further from the electrode means passing more current through nearby cells. DBS is by far the most precise clinical procedure for controlling areas of the brain, but it’s still disappointingly non-specific.

A new technique called optogenetics combines genetic engineering, lasers, neurology and surgery to create a direct control mechanism.

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Problems are solved by sleeping

Volunteers who entered REM during sleep improved their creative problem solving ability by almost 40%, University of California San Diego researchers showed.

The researchers believe REM sleep allows the brain to form new nerve connections without the interference of other thought pathways that occur when we are awake or in non-dream-state sleep.

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Wireless Power Harvesting for Cell Phones

A cell phone that never needs recharging might sound too good to be true, but Nokia says it's developing technology that could draw enough power from ambient radio waves to keep a cell-phone handset topped up.


The Nokia device will work on the same principles as a crystal radio set or radio frequency identification (RFID) tag: by converting electromagnetic waves into an electrical signal. This requires two passive circuits. "Even if you are only getting microwatts, you can still harvest energy, provided your circuit is not using more power than it's receiving," says Markku Rouvala a researcher from the Nokia Research Centre, in Cambridge, U.K.

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Ultrasound might provide a new, noninvasive way to control brain activity

Ultrasound waves, currently used in medicine for prenatal scans and other diagnostic purposes, could one day be used as a noninvasive way to control brain activity. Over the past two years, scientists have begun experimenting with low-frequency, low-intensity ultrasound that can penetrate the skull and activate or silence brain cells. Researchers hope that the technology could provide an alternative to more-invasive techniques, such as deep-brain stimulation (DBS) and vagus nerve stimulation, which are used to treat a growing number of neurological disorders.

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IBM's Watson takes on Jeopardy

IBM has unveiled the details of its plans to build a computing system that can understand complex questions and answer with enough precision and speed to compete on a favorite quiz show, Jeopardy!. Onstage, completely isolated from other computers, the Internet, or human help, the Watson computer will receive the clue electronically, precisely when the human players see it. Competing in this way on Jeopardy! makes a great avenue for comparison between humans and machines. Competing at Jeopardy! is just the first step for DeepQA.

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Will designer brains divide humanity?

We are on the brink of technological breakthroughs that could augment our mental powers beyond recognition. It will soon be possible to boost human brainpower with electronic "plug-ins" or even by genetic enhancement. What will this mean for the future of humanity?

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Ultra-Efficient Organic LEDs

An organic light-emitting diode (OLED) developed in Germany has the potential to produce the same quality of white light as incandescent bulbs but with power efficiencies considerably better than even fluorescent lighting.

The prototype OLED could emerge as an ultra-efficient light source for displays and general lighting, says Sebastian Reineke, who led the research at the Institute for Applied Photophysics, in Dresden, Germany. The long-term goal is to fabricate the device using conventional low-cost roll-to-roll printing.

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Emotional speech leaves 'signature' on the brain

If I was reading this sentence aloud, your brain would be able to interpret whether I was speaking in anger, joy, relief, or sadness. That's because emotions in speech leave distinct "signatures" in the brain of the listener.

Now, for the first time, brain scans have now characterised those patterns. The finding could help determine where in the brain deficits in emotion processing occur in people with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia.

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Possible site of free will found in brain

Free will, or at least the place where we decide to act, is sited in a part of the brain called the parietal cortex, new research suggests. When a neurosurgeon electrically jolted this region in patients undergoing surgery, they felt a desire to, say, wiggle their finger, roll their tongue or move a limb. Stronger electrical pulses convinced patients they had actually performed these movements, although their bodies remained motionless. "What it tells us is there are specific brain regions that are involved in the consciousness of your movement," says Angela Sirigu (pdf format), a neuroscientist at the CNRS Cognitive Neuroscience Centre in Bron, France, who led the study.

The Science of Concentration

In the nearer future, neuroscientists might help you focus by observing your brain activity and providing biofeedback as you practice strengthening your concentration. Researchers have already observed higher levels of synchrony in the brains of people who regularly meditate.

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Augmented Reality

EARBUDS can pipe audio directly from a portable player to the ear. But did you ever imagine that eyeglasses or contact lenses could deliver digital images directly from a smartphone to the retina?
Several companies are already developing prototypes...

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Neuroenhancing

A young man I’ll call Alex recently graduated from Harvard. As a history major, Alex wrote about a dozen papers a semester. He also ran a student organization, for which he often worked more than forty hours a week; when he wasn’t on the job, he had classes. Weeknights were devoted to all the schoolwork that he couldn’t finish during the day, and weekend nights were spent drinking with friends and going to dance parties. “Trite as it sounds,” he told me, it seemed important to “maybe appreciate my own youth.” Since, in essence, this life was impossible, Alex began taking Adderall to make it possible...

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Using GPS to track down asthma triggers

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin in Madison recently launched a study using Global Positioning System (GPS) devices to monitor where and when patients use their inhalers, a technology they hope will uncover unrecognized triggers of asthma symptoms.

Scientists have long known that environmental factors such as pollen, cigarette smoke, and air pollutants aggravate symptoms of asthma, such as wheezing, coughing, and shortness of breath. But the leader of the study David Van Sickle, an epidemiologist at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health says it's likely there are unknown environmental culprits. Figuring out exactly when and where asthma attacks occur can help pinpoint these aggravators, he adds.

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Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory

SUNY Downstate Medical Center neuroscientists have discovered that a single dose of an experimental drug delivered to areas of the brain critical for holding specific types of memory (like emotional associations or spatial knowledge) blocks the activity of a substance that the brain apparently needs to retain much of its learned information. If enhanced, the substance could help ward off dementias and other memory problems, but raises huge ethical issues.

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Brain Images Reveal the Secret to Higher IQ

New research suggests that the layer of insulation coating neural wiring in the brain plays a critical role in determining intelligence. In addition, the quality of this insulation appears to be largely genetically determined, providing further support for the idea that IQ is partly inherited.

The findings, which result from a detailed study of twins' brains, hint at how ever-improving brain-imaging technology could shed light on some of our most basic characteristics.

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Brain wave patterns can predict blunders, new study finds

From spilling a cup of coffee to failing to notice a stop sign, everyone makes an occasional error due to lack of attention. Now a team led by a researcher at the University of California, Davis, in collaboration with the Donders Institute in the Netherlands, has found a distinct electric signature in the brain which predicts that such an error is about to be made.

The discovery could prove useful in a variety of applications, from developing monitoring devices that alert air traffic control operators that their attention is flagging, to devising new strategies to help children cope with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The work was posted online on March 23 by the journal Human Brain Mapping as part of a special issue highlighting innovations in electromagnetic brain imaging that will be published in May.

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Brain scan reveals memories of where you've been

Scans of the part of the brain responsible for memory have for the first time been used to detect a person's location in a virtual environment. Using functional MRI (fMRI), researchers decoded the approximate location of several people as they navigated through virtual rooms.

This finding suggests that more detailed mind-reading, such detecting as memories of a summer holiday, might eventually be possible, says Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist at University College London.Her team trained its scanner on the hippocampus, a region of the brain critical to the formation and storage of memories. It is known that in animals, specialised place cells in the hippocampus fire regularly as they move from place to place.

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Probing the brain wirelessly

Infrared-absorbing lead selenide particles form the basis of a method for the study of neuronal activation in samples of brain tissues without the need for hard-wired electrodes. The technique instead utilises light-triggered nanostructured semiconductor photoelectrodes to probe activity.

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Wireless activation of brain with nanoparticless emiting near infrared light

Traditionally, stimulating nerves or brain tissue involves cumbersome wiring and a sharp metal electrode. But a team of researchers at Case Western Reserve University is going "wireless."And it's a unique collaboration between chemists and neuroscientists that led to the discovery of a remarkable new way to use light to activate brain circuits with nanoparticles.


By using semiconductor nanoparticles as tiny solar cells, the scientists can excite neurons in single cells or groups of cells with infrared light. This eliminates the need for the complex wiring by embedding the light-activated nanoparticles directly into the tissue. This method allows for a more controlled reaction and closely replicates the sophisticated focal patterns created by natural stimuli.

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Microsoft Word / EndNote slow downs

If you experience serious slow downs/lags while using Word with Endnote, try the following two steps:

1. In Word 2002 (XP)/2003, select Tools / EndNote / Cite While You Write Preferences.
   In Word 2007, go to the "Add-ins" tab and EndNote / Cite While You Write Preferences.
   
   
2. Uncheck the two boxes labeled "Scan for temporary citations" and "Check for citation changes".

Note that this does not disable Instant Formatting or Cite While You Write. It simply alters the way Instant Formatting works so that the functions that trigger the lag issue are not invoked

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A peak in to the Memory with fMRI

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) looks more and more like a window into the mind. In a study published online today in Nature, researchers at Vanderbilt University report that from fMRI data alone, they could distinguish which of two images subjects were holding in their memory--even several seconds after the images were removed. The study also pinpointed, for the first time, where in the brain visual working memory is maintained.

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More chip cores can mean slower supercomputing

The worldwide attempt to increase the speed of supercomputers merely by increasing the number of processor cores on individual chips unexpectedly worsens performance for many complex applications, Sandia simulations have found.

A Sandia team simulated key algorithms for deriving knowledge from large data sets. The simulations show a significant increase in speed going from two to four multicores, but an insignificant increase from four to eight multicores. Exceeding eight multicores causes a decrease in speed. Sixteen multicores perform barely as well as two, and after that, a steep decline is registered as more cores are added.

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Study Finds Color Boosts Brain Performance

According to a new study, the brain performance of people is unconsciously enhanced by different colors depending upon the nature of the task. In their study, University of British Columbia researchers set out to resolve a long running debate among advertisers about which color, red or blue, stimulates the brain more.

Marketing professor Juliet Zhu says both colors stimulate the brain, but it depends upon the nature of the activity. "If the task is calling for attention to details, then red color will help in particular. But if the task is more creative in nature, then (a) blue color will help," she said. Zhu and colleagues followed 600 participants between 2007 and 2008, tracking their performance on six cognitive tests on a computer that required either detail orientation or creativity.

While exposed to tasks on a red screen, Zhu says the volunteers in one group were asked to memorize a list of words and then recall them twenty minutes later. "What we found was that those in the red color background condition were able to make more accurate recalls than those in the blue background conditions," he said. Zhu says the color red enhanced the detail-oriented skills of the volunteers by 31 percent.She says people using blue computer screens to perform creative works scored two times higher on a scale measuring creativity than people who performed the activities on red screens.

The study on color and brain performance is published this week in the journal Science "Blue or Red? Exploring the Effect of Color on Cognitive Task Performances"

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TED 2009

The annual conference TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design)  for 2009 has started. This conference brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. See the conference program and watch talks online at http://conferences.ted.com/TED2009/

Study shows what makes locusts swarm

A brain chemical that lifts people out of depression can transform solitary grasshoppers into swarming desert locusts, a finding that could one day help prevent the devastating plagues, University of Cambridge researchers said.

Increases of serotonin, the nerve-signalling chemical targeted by many antidepressants, appears to spark the behaviour changes needed to turn the normally harmless insects into bugs that gang up to munch crops, they said.

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The Glucose-Monitoring Tattoo

Scientists at Draper Laboratory, in Cambridge, MA, are developing a nanosensor that could be injected into the skin, much like tattoo dye, to monitor an individual's blood-sugar level. As the glucose level increases, the "tattoo" would fluoresce under an infrared light, telling a diabetic whether or not she needs an insulin shot following a meal. The researchers will soon begin animal tests of the glucose-specific sensor.

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Top Technology Breakthroughs of 2008

Here's list of innovations in 2008 from Wired.com:

10. Flexible Displays
9. Edible Chips
8. Speedo LZR
7. Flash Memory (FDD)
6. GPS
5. The Memristor
4. Video-Capable SLRs
3. USB 3.0
2. Android
1. Apple's App Store

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