Nothing about how a bunch of Oxford researchers recently pulled neural stem cells out of the brains of living rats seems feasible. The cells are hard to isolate. Brains are fragile. Okay, brains are very fragile. But they’ve done it, and the procedure could shed fresh light on diseases like Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis.
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Your computer can be hacked. Your phone can get hacked. Your e-mail account. Your Facebook account. And even… your brain. AsapSCIENCE explains how we’re coming up with ways to use technology—special lasers!—to hack our brains.
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“A 1.5 kilogram clump of fatty tissue which is located in our head.” That’s how curator Marius Kwint describes the enigmatic subject of Brains: The Mind as Matter, a new exhibition at Manchester’s Museum of Science & Industry. The reality, of course, is infinitely more complex—and this not-for-the-squeamish show displays some of the more fascinating experiments, interventions, and artworks produced with our minds in mind.
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I remember being a kid and watching Indiana Jones and the Temple Of Doom. It was a great movie for kids, but one part that always grossed me out was the chilled monkey brains that were served in the palace. Gross.
Well, if you enjoyed that scene from the classic Indiana Jones movie, you can relive it with your own chilled monkey brains cake. Yes, you can make this and creep everyone out. This twisted cake comes from Instructable user BubbleandSweet.
You can bet it will taste better than the real thing. It looks just like the monkey from the movie. It even has the white hair just like in the movie. It looks delicious, but gross.
[via Neatorama]
Forget complex math problems, logic puzzles, memorization. The hardest thing you can try to do with your brain is to not think about something. It’s virtually impossible. But why? As New Scientist explains, it has to do with what thoughts are actually made out of.
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You know that scene in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind when they’re scanning through Jim Carrey’s playdoh-faced head, looking for bad memories to erase? A bunch of eggheads from MIT just figured out how to do that for real! Sort of. In all seriousness, though, the discovery is poised to do a lot of good for sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder.
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The tragedy of Parkinson’s, which progressively robs patients of their physical abilities, is that while certain drugs, therapies and devices
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For the very first time, scientists have managed to create tiny, embryonic brains in test tubes. Say hello to baby Frankenstein.
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Human brain-to-brain interfacing seems like the stuff of fiction (Pacific Rim, anyone?), but researchers at the University of Washington have made it a reality. A team led by faculty members Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco claim to have pioneered the world’s first human-to-human experiment of the sort. Rao and Stocco were placed in different buildings and hooked up to two devices to record, interpret and send their brain signals via the internet. The sender (Rao) wore an EEG machine while the receiver (Stocco) was connected to a transcranial magnetic stimulation coil. The experiment was performed with a simple arcade-style video game, the objective of which was to shoot baddies out of the sky. Rao watched the screen and visualized lifting his hand to press the space bar to fire, but Stocco was the trigger man. Clear across campus, Stocco’s finger tapped the space bar at the appropriate time, eliminating the target, despite being unable to hear or see the game’s display. To learn more, check out the video after the break or the source link below.
Via: GeekWire
Source: University of Washington
Sit down for this one. Researchers at the University of Washington have figured out how to send commands from one person’s brain to control a different person’s muscle movement. In technical terms, it’s the world’s first noninvasive human-to-human brain interface. How’d they do it? Vulcan mind meld? Nope, just the regular ol’ internet. What in the hell?
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