Transcranial alternating current stimulation used to boost working memory

Researchers at Imperial College London found that applying transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) through the scalp helped to synchronize brain waves in different areas of the brain, enabling subjects to perform better on tasks involving short-term working memory.

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Artificial Retina

Physicists developed an interface to the optical nerve using graphene for an optical prostheses.

Graphene is viewed as a kind of "miracle solution": It is thin, transparent and has a tensile strength greater than that of steel. In addition, it conducts electricity better than copper. Since it comprises only a single layer of carbon atoms it is considered two-dimensional.

 In 2010 the scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Prize for their ground-breaking work on this material.

In October 2013, the "Graphene" project was selected alongside the "Human Brain Project" as a Flagship Project of the EU FET Initiative (Future and Emerging Technologies).

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Sugar-powered biobattery has 10 times the energy storage of lithium: Your smartphone might soon run on enzymes

Researchers at Virginia Tech have successfully created a sugar-powered fuel cell that has an energy storage density of 596 amp-hours per kilo — or “one order of magnitude” higher than lithium-ion batteries. This fuel cell is refillable with a solution of maltodextrin, and its only by products are electricity and water. The chief researcher, Dr. Zhang, says the tech could be commercialized in as soon as three years.

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Cognitive enhancement with electrical current

A new study suggests that a gentle, painless electrical current applied to the brain can boost math performance for up to 6 months. Researchers don't fully understand how it works, however, and there could be side effects.

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How a Vision Prosthetic Could Bypass the Visual System

Electrical stimulation of the visual cortex may one day give image perception to blind people. Work presented at the Society for Neuroscience 2012 meeting in New Orleans suggested a way to create a completely new kind of visual prosthetic—one that restores vision by directly activating the brain.

In a poster session, researchers presented results showing how electrical stimulation of the visual cortex can evoke the sensation of simple flashes of light—including spatial information about those flashes. 

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A Terminator-style contact-lens display

Bringing us a step closer to a Terminator-style augmented-reality display, University of Washington engineers have constructed an experimental contact lens with a single-pixel embedded light-emitting diode (LED) and tested it in a rabbit.

The LED lights up when it receives energy from a remote radio frequency transmission, picked up by an antenna around the edge and collected via a silicon power harvesting and radio integrated circuit.

Single-pixel wireless contact lens display (credit: University of Washington/Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering)

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Stick-On Electronic Tattoos

Researchers have made stretchable, ultrathin electronics that cling to skin like a temporary tattoo and can measure electrical activity from the body. These electronic tattoos could allow doctors to diagnose and monitor conditions like heart arrhythmia or sleep disorders noninvasively.

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Remote Control of Brain Activity Using Ultrasound

A novel technology that implements transcranial pulsed ultrasound to remotely and directly stimulate brain circuits without requiring surgery has been developed. The technology has a spatial resolution approximately five times greater than transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and can exert its effects upon subcortical brain circuits deep within the brain.

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Harvesting heat to power electronics

Thermoelectric (TE) energy harvesting is based on the heat flux through a thermoelectric element. The heat flux is driven by a temperature difference across the element. The generated voltage is proportional to the number of elements and the temperature difference.

The TE-Power Node uses any source of thermal energy to drive a wireless transceiver, storing power in a thin-film battery. The Node is a test bed for designers looking to build the next generation of sensor networks, in which the sensors power themselves by harvesting energy from the environment. The battery stores the power that trickles in from sources such as a warm industrial exhaust pipe and then releases the accumulated energy in a pulse powerful enough to operate the radio. A 10 °C difference in temperature produces enough electricity to transmit 13 bytes of information per second.

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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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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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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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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.

IBM seeks to simulate brain

IBM Research and five universities have partnered to create low-power-consumption and compact-sized computing systems that they expect will simulate and emulate the brain’s abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction, and cognition.


IBM’s proposal, “Cognitive computing via synaptronics and supercomputing,” (C2S2) outlines research to be conducted over the next nine months in areas including synaptronics, material science, neuromorphic circuitry, supercomputing simulations, and virtual environments.

Encouraging the effort, IBM and its collaborators have been awarded $4.9 million in funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the first phase of DARPA’s Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) initiative.

Initial C2S2 research will focus on demonstrating nanoscale, low-power synapse-like devices and on "uncovering the functional microcircuits of the brain," IBM said, noting that the long-term mission of C2S2 is to demonstrate low-power, compact cognitive computers that approach mammalian-scale intelligence.

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Memristor - Missing Fourth Electronic Circuit Element

In 1971, a University of California, Berkeley, engineer predicted that there should be a fourth element: a memory resistor, or memristor. But no one knew how to build one. Now, 37 years later, electronics have finally gotten small enough to reveal the secrets of that fourth element. The memristor, Hewlett-Packard researchers revealed on April 30, 2008 in the journal Nature, had been hiding in plain sight all along—within the electrical characteristics of certain nanoscale devices. They think the new element could pave the way for applications both near- and far-term, from nonvolatile RAM to realistic neural networks.

HP Labs has made a nano-scale device which stores data, explains previous anomalies in nano-device characteristics, and may be able to act as a synapse in analogue neural networks. It is also the first physical implementation of the memristor, a theoretical partner to resistors, capacitors and inductors invented in 1971.

[ more ] [ Memristor Theory ]

Wireless Power Transmission: Tesla Revisited

In the late 19th century, Nikola Tesla, among other inventions, dreamed up wireless electric distribution. He drew up plans for a tower, about 57 meters tall, that he claimed would transmit power to kilometers away. However, he run out of funding before he could finish towers.

Then, a few years ago, Marin Soljačić, an assistant professor of physics at MIT started searching for ways to transmit power wirelessly. Instead of pursuing a long-distance scheme like Tesla's, he decided to look for midrange power transmission methods that could charge--or even power--portabl­e devices such as cell phones, PDAs, and laptops.

So far, the most effective setup consists of 60-centimeter copper coils and a 10-megahertz magnetic field; this transfers power over a distance of two meters with about 50 percent efficiency. The team is looking at silver and other materials to decrease coil size and boost efficiency. "While ideally it would be nice to have efficiencies at 100 percent, realistically, 70 to 80 percent could be possible for a typical application," says Soljačić.

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