A year and a half ago, we published a great feature on the current state of the quest to read the human mind. It included some then in-progress work from Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at U.C. Berkeley, in which Gallant was attempting to reconstruct a video by reading the brain scans of someone who watched that video - essentially pulling experiences directly from someone's brain. Now, Gallant and his team have published a paper on the subject in the journal Current Biology.
Pain must be the bane of many a doctor's existence. It's a major symptom and indicator of many illnesses, but doctors have to rely on humans to describe and rate it, and humans are a distinctly unreliable source of information. What's a "7" on the pain scale for someone might be a "4" for another. What's a "pulsing" pain for someone might be a "pounding" for someone else. At Stanford, some doctors are figuring out the first steps to objectively measure pain, finally putting that all to rest.
Today in pretty space pics, Cassini proves once again that it's the spacecraft that just keeps on giving. Its mission was supposed to end in 2008 but has twice been extended, most recently out to 2017. That's fine with us, since it keeps sending back pics like these from its wide orbit around what is arguably the solar system's second-coolest planet. Represented here: Saturn's signature rings and five of its more than 60 natural satellites - Janus, Pandora, Enceladus, Mimas and Rhea (from left to right).
A new satellite defence technology is about to get its first real-world test in orbit, and while we naturally don't get to know much about it just yet, the US Air Force has confirmed that a classified satellite launching sometime in the near future will carry the awkwardly named Self-Awareness Space Situational Awareness system, or SASSA. Like radar for satellites, the system will alert operators of potential space-borne threat to the satellite and perhaps even take kinetic action should a satellite become threatened.
Scientists at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks have successfully caused a group of arctic ground squirrels, naturally hibernating animals, to wake from and then go back into hibernation. It's the first time anyone has ever managed to induce hibernation, and it could have some pretty amazing medical benefits for humans as well.
Sitting back, chatting with your mates, watching the scenery pass you by - these pastimes are generally enjoyed by the passengers of a vehicle while the driver remains focused on bringing the carload to its destination. But a car designed by researchers from Berlin has successfully completed an 80 kilometre test run around the traffic-filled streets of Germany’s capital - without the driver lifting a finger.
America's drone fleet has become an increasingly relied-upon wing of its counter-insurgency strategy and plays a key role in its geopolitical policy, particularly in Pakistan where unmanned aircraft routinely venture into sovereign territory and deliver lethal payloads to targets on the ground. But the Washington Post asks: just exactly how far away are we from real "killer robots." The answer, in this morning's piece of recommended reading, is: we're already there.
In another step toward a cleaner energy future, scientists in the US have found a way to sustainably generate hydrogen using just water and bacteria. Using a process called reverse electro-dialysis, researchers an Penn State university have extracted the gas from water by breaking up its molecules.
Researchers at the National University of Singapore are enhancing robots' sense of touch by mimicking the ridged and contoured surfaces of human fingertips. Fingerprints, it turns out, don't just give humans better grip but also carry out a sensitive type of signal processing. By imparting that same kind of signal processing to robots, we could reduce the processing loads to robots' CPUs and help them better identify objects through their shapes.
More than ten years after the fact, a scientist based at the Norwegian research institute SINTEF is proposing that a well-documented chemical reaction spelled the ultimate demise of the Twin Towers after the attacks of September 11, 2020. This isn't another conspiracy theory, nor is it proven fact. But Christian Simensen theorises that a mix of molten aluminium from the aircraft bodies mixed with water from the sprinkler systems could have catalysed secondary blasts that brought the World Trade Center towers to the ground.
Human-machine interfaces are constantly improving, but our inability to fully integrate electronics into our bodies stems in part from the very nature of that word - electronics. For the most part, machines relay information using electrons, but living systems use protons and ions. Now a new proton-based transistor built partly from crab shells could open the gates to a new method of communication between machines and biological systems.
While the country bumpkin farmer stereotype might suggest otherwise, driving a tractor is difficult, requiring precision skills. Now Flemish engineers have announced a new self-driving tractor with precision that rivals a human driver. This could mean drastically lower operating costs for farmers, and a step towards automated agriculture.
Research at Nanjing University has found that strands of RNA from vegetables make it into our bloodstream after we eat them, and can regulate the expression of our genes once they're inside us.MicroRNAs, or miRNAs, are little strands of RNA that selectively bind to matching sequences of messenger RNA, resulting in repression of those genes.
Likely prompted in no small part by last month's Progress cargo ship crash in Russia, NASA has announced a US$1.6 billion contract running through 2014 to develop complete end-to-end cargo and crew transportation between Earth and the International Space Station. In other words, NASA is getting really serious about developing commercial space taxis that can do what the shuttle no longer can: get people and supplies to and from the space station without relying solely on Russian technology.
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