The implants would use light pulses to activate certain brain regions and reroute function

Such brain implants made from electrodes or optical fibers would sit on the brain's surface and monitor the electrical signals sent among neurons. They would also beam light pulses to stimulate specific parts of the brain in response, and ideally help the brain function normally despite having damaged areas.

The appropriately-named REPAIR (Reorganization and Plasticity to Accelerate Injury Recovery) project involves a team led by Stanford and Brown universities working with a two-year budget of $14.9 million. First up for the optogenetic tests are mice, rats and eventually monkeys.

Learning how to manage the human brain has been a top priority for DARPA in recent years, given the mad science lab's orders for technology such as cryogenic methods to freeze traumatic brain injury in its tracks. But they also seek to co-opt the brain's power for directly controlling prosthetic limbs usable by wounded warfighters. Even if this latest venture does not directly heal, it may at least help negate the effects of brain injuries so that it's as if they never existed.

[via Wired's Danger Room]

The implants would use light pulses to activate certain brain regions and reroute function

Such brain implants made from electrodes or optical fibers would sit on the brain's surface and monitor the electrical signals sent among neurons. They would also beam light pulses to stimulate specific parts of the brain in response, and ideally help the brain function normally despite having damaged areas.

The appropriately-named REPAIR (Reorganization and Plasticity to Accelerate Injury Recovery) project involves a team led by Stanford and Brown universities working with a two-year budget of $14.9 million. First up for the optogenetic tests are mice, rats and eventually monkeys.

Learning how to manage the human brain has been a top priority for DARPA in recent years, given the mad science lab's orders for technology such as cryogenic methods to freeze traumatic brain injury in its tracks. But they also seek to co-opt the brain's power for directly controlling prosthetic limbs usable by wounded warfighters. Even if this latest venture does not directly heal, it may at least help negate the effects of brain injuries so that it's as if they never existed.

[via Wired's Danger Room]

The implants would use light pulses to activate certain brain regions and reroute function

Such brain implants made from electrodes or optical fibers would sit on the brain's surface and monitor the electrical signals sent among neurons. They would also beam light pulses to stimulate specific parts of the brain in response, and ideally help the brain function normally despite having damaged areas.

The appropriately-named REPAIR (Reorganization and Plasticity to Accelerate Injury Recovery) project involves a team led by Stanford and Brown universities working with a two-year budget of $14.9 million. First up for the optogenetic tests are mice, rats and eventually monkeys.

Learning how to manage the human brain has been a top priority for DARPA in recent years, given the mad science lab's orders for technology such as cryogenic methods to freeze traumatic brain injury in its tracks. But they also seek to co-opt the brain's power for directly controlling prosthetic limbs usable by wounded warfighters. Even if this latest venture does not directly heal, it may at least help negate the effects of brain injuries so that it's as if they never existed.

[via Wired's Danger Room]

The implants would use light pulses to activate certain brain regions and reroute function

Such brain implants made from electrodes or optical fibers would sit on the brain's surface and monitor the electrical signals sent among neurons. They would also beam light pulses to stimulate specific parts of the brain in response, and ideally help the brain function normally despite having damaged areas.

The appropriately-named REPAIR (Reorganization and Plasticity to Accelerate Injury Recovery) project involves a team led by Stanford and Brown universities working with a two-year budget of $14.9 million. First up for the optogenetic tests are mice, rats and eventually monkeys.

Learning how to manage the human brain has been a top priority for DARPA in recent years, given the mad science lab's orders for technology such as cryogenic methods to freeze traumatic brain injury in its tracks. But they also seek to co-opt the brain's power for directly controlling prosthetic limbs usable by wounded warfighters. Even if this latest venture does not directly heal, it may at least help negate the effects of brain injuries so that it's as if they never existed.

[via Wired's Danger Room]

The implants would use light pulses to activate certain brain regions and reroute function

Such brain implants made from electrodes or optical fibers would sit on the brain's surface and monitor the electrical signals sent among neurons. They would also beam light pulses to stimulate specific parts of the brain in response, and ideally help the brain function normally despite having damaged areas.

The appropriately-named REPAIR (Reorganization and Plasticity to Accelerate Injury Recovery) project involves a team led by Stanford and Brown universities working with a two-year budget of $14.9 million. First up for the optogenetic tests are mice, rats and eventually monkeys.

Learning how to manage the human brain has been a top priority for DARPA in recent years, given the mad science lab's orders for technology such as cryogenic methods to freeze traumatic brain injury in its tracks. But they also seek to co-opt the brain's power for directly controlling prosthetic limbs usable by wounded warfighters. Even if this latest venture does not directly heal, it may at least help negate the effects of brain injuries so that it's as if they never existed.

[via Wired's Danger Room]

The implants would use light pulses to activate certain brain regions and reroute function

Such brain implants made from electrodes or optical fibers would sit on the brain's surface and monitor the electrical signals sent among neurons. They would also beam light pulses to stimulate specific parts of the brain in response, and ideally help the brain function normally despite having damaged areas.

The appropriately-named REPAIR (Reorganization and Plasticity to Accelerate Injury Recovery) project involves a team led by Stanford and Brown universities working with a two-year budget of $14.9 million. First up for the optogenetic tests are mice, rats and eventually monkeys.

Learning how to manage the human brain has been a top priority for DARPA in recent years, given the mad science lab's orders for technology such as cryogenic methods to freeze traumatic brain injury in its tracks. But they also seek to co-opt the brain's power for directly controlling prosthetic limbs usable by wounded warfighters. Even if this latest venture does not directly heal, it may at least help negate the effects of brain injuries so that it's as if they never existed.

[via Wired's Danger Room]

The $25,000 Best Of What's New award winner is scheduled for full production in 2012

The XM-25 resembles a highly sophisticated grenade launcher that fires laser-guided smart rounds. The laser gauges a distance to target and allows the warfighter to set where the round will detonate, adding or subtracting increments of 3 meters from the laser-spotted point. Then the scope tells a microchip inside the round how far it should travel before exploding.

Each Heckler & Koch-made 25mm round actually holds two warheads that pack more punch than the current 40mm grenade launchers. Warfighters would basically have immediate, long-distance explosive firepower in rifle form, as opposed to having to wait on mortar strikes, artillery or airstrikes.

All that high-tech gadgetry earned the XM-25 one of PopSci's Best of What's New awards for 2009, but it doesn't come cheap, at $25,000 per weapon. Still, that may prove more cost-effective for rooting out embedded enemies compared to relying upon expensive Hellfire missiles fired from Apache attack helicopters.

Army plans call for full production start in 2012 and an initial buy of 12,500 XM-25s. Until then, warfighters might get dumbed-down sense of such a weapon's effectiveness by playing with the detonate-upon-command grenade launcher in Halo: Reach.

[via Military.com]

First ever study of how robots attack tests their murderous ways

Human volunteers also subjected their arms to the tender mercies of the slasher bots, but only when a prototype safety system was engaged. The collision detection system used torque sensors to spot when it hits a different substance and freeze in mid-motion, so that damage to the human subjects was limited.

We're still a bit puzzled as to why human volunteers were in this experiment at all, when there's perfectly good ballistic dummies being eviscerated every week on Spike TV's Deadliest Warrior. But perhaps the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at the German aerospace agency felt human arms would represent a less expensive option.

The study was presented at the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, held in Alaska earlier this month. We're all for developing safety systems that engage for robots too dumb to recognize Asimov's Laws of Robotics, but we'd still recommend carving your own steak in the future.

[via BBC]

Snort a dose of prevention for measles or other diseases

The inhalable vaccine bypasses the need for icky needles by mixing liquid carbon dioxide with weakened measles virus. That process creates microscopic bubbles and droplets which dry out and become an inhalable powder. Patients can then inhale their protection through a plastic nozzle similar to the neck of a plastic water bottle.

Making the breakthrough required researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder to develop a mixing device known as the Carbon Dioxide Assisted Nebulization with a Bubble Dryer, or CAN-BD. The device mixes two streams of fluid and then rapidly expands them to atmospheric pressure, before mixing in warm nitrogen to try the tiny bubbles and droplets.

"One of our primary goals of this project is to get rid of needles and syringes, because they frighten some people, they hurt, they can transmit diseases and there are issues with needle disposal," said Robert Sievers, a biochemist at CU Boulder. His innovation also represents a cost-effective method, at just 26 cents per dose, or about the cost of an injectable vaccine.

The no-needles approach has proved popular elsewhere. Australian scientists have developed a postage stamp-sized vaccine patches that can deliver a tiny but effective dose through the skin.

A first focus on measles makes sense, given that the inhalable vaccine goes directly to the lungs where measles typically attacks. But trypanophobes can also keep their fingers crossed for an inhalable treatment which delivers antibiotic particles for treating tuberculosis, or an inhalable treatment for the papilloma virus which causes cervical cancer.

The case could represent a legal precedent for sorting out truth from falsehood in a court of law

The lawyer, David Levin, represents a woman who claims that she no longer received good assignments from a temp agency after she complained of sexual harassment at a job site. A coworker at the temp agency claimed he heard a supervisor say the woman should not be placed on jobs because of the complaint.

That prompted Levin to have the coworker undergo a functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scan by the company Cephos, which claims to provide scientific validation of whether someone is telling the truth. Now the proposed evidence will test the New York standards for scientific evidence in courts -- known as the Frye standard -- which typically requires the evidence to be considered reliable among the broader scientific community.

Both Cephos and another company called No Lie MRI have marketed their brain scans as lie detectors since 2007. They report accuracy rates from 75 percent to 98 percent under lab conditions, but many neuroscientists remain skeptical of, or outright opposed to, using brain scan technology in court.

We reported earlier on a Cephos-funded fMRI study at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, which tested people who participated in a mock crime within the experiment. The test caught guilty parties, but also sometimes netted innocents who were telling the truth.

Last year, an Illinois court allowed an expert to describe the fMRI brain scan of man accused of murdering a 10-year-old-girl. But that was presented as evidence of the man's mental illness during the sentencing phase of the trial, whereas the new Brooklyn case would be a legal first for determining truth-telling.

We'll be sure to keep an eye on whether this battleground between science and the law translates into wider use of brain scans or not. If it does pass muster with the Frye standard, expect even more debate over the use of brain scans as direct mind readers in the future.

[via Wired]