Friday, October 8, 1999
A team of US scientists have wired a computer to a cat's brain and created videos of what the animal was seeing. In a paper published in the Journal of Neuroscience, Yang Dan, Garret Stanley and Fei Li of the University of California at Berkeley describe reconstructing natural scenes with recognizable moving objects.
The researchers attached electrodes to 177 cells in the so-called thalamus region of the cat's brain and monitored their activity. The thalamus is connected directly to the cat's eyes via the optic nerve. Each of its cells is programmed to respond to certain features in the cat's field of view. Some cells "fire" when they record an edge in the cat's vision, others when they see lines at certain angles, etc. This way the cat's brain acquires the information it needs to reconstruct an image.
They recorded the patterns of firing from the cells in a computer. They then used a technique they describe as a "linear decoding technique" to reconstruct an image. To their amazement they say they saw natural scenes with recognisable objects such as people's faces. They had literally seen the world through cat's eyes.
This as an important step in our understanding of how signals are represented and processed in the brain. It could lead to greatly improved computer vision for robots and theraputic aids for humans with imparied vision.
Editor-in-Chief: E C Teague
All aspects of nanometre scale science and technology are covered in this journal. The Supramolecular Science and Technology section covers molecular materials and self-assembly processes.
NanoTechnology
Predictions : Thirty Great Minds on the Future (Popular Science)
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Sian Griffiths (Editor)
These predictions about the 21st century are from 30 of today's best-known minds - including Richard Dawkins, Umberto Eco, J.K. Galbraith, Steven Pinker, and Peter Singer. The predictions outline the discoveries/changes that the contributors expect to see happen in their field in the 21st century. Each prediction is followed by a profile of the writer, setting his or her work in context and explaining the theories or inventions. Taken as a whole, the book provides a snapshot of the state of knowledge across a broad range of fields at the millennium's end. Chemist Carl Djerassi, inventor of the contraceptive pill, predicts the setting up of fertility banks, full of frozen sperm and eggs, where couples who want to have children will open accounts. Philosopher Peter Singer predicts that animals will be granted the same rights as humans. Nobel physicist Steven Weinberg expects that in the next century there will be an answer to the question "What are the Laws of Everything?" Cybernetics professor Kevin Warwick describes a future where humans will be able to read one anothers thoughts, by means of electronic implants in the human body. Economist J.K. Galbraith hopes for controls on the nuclear threat.
science news
September 9, 1999
It has just 78 atoms, took four years to build and it has a spindle that takes hours to rotate but it could be the forerunner of a revolution.
Attempts by scientists to produce molecule-sized machines have produced a toolbox of parts, gears, rotors, switches, turnstiles but no one has produced a molecular motor, until now.
Two molecular motors are reported in the journal Nature.
Nature
SETI@home is a scientific experiment that will harness the power of hundreds of thousands of Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data. There's a small but captivating possibility that your computer will detect the faint murmur of a civilization beyond Earth.
Figure 1 Credit
Clipart image from Corel Draw
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