Electronically linked brains could facilitate rehabilitation and revolutionise computing

In Star Trek, the Borg is a menacing race of cybernetically-enhanced beings who conquer other races and assimilate them. They do not act as individuals, but rather as an interconnected group that makes decisions collectively. Assimilation involves integrating other life forms into the Collective, using brain implants that connect them to the "hive mind," such that their biology and technology can help the Borg to become the perfect race. This is a popular concept that can be found elsewhere in science fiction, but scientists have now moved a step closer to making it a reality.

Earlier this month, Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University Medical Center and his colleagues reported the development of a brain-machine interface that enables rats to detect infrared light via their sense of touch. Now, the same group of researchers has taken this technology in an entirely new direction - they have developed a brain-to-brain interface that can transmit information from one rat directly to another, enabling the animal on the receiving end to perform behavioural tasks without training.

In one experiment, Nicolelis and his colleagues placed rats into a box containing two levers, and trained the animals to press one of them whenever it lit up, or to poke their noses into one of two different-sized holes in order to get a drink. They then trained another group of rats to perform both tasks while their brains were stimulated with electrodes implanted into the motor cortex, which controls movement, or the somatosensory cortex, which processes touch information, mostly from the whiskers. In this way, the second group of animals learned the gist of both tasks and became accustomed to pressing one of the levers and poking their noses into one of the holes, depending on the frequency of the electrical stimulation.

Making a left-hand turn requires a huge amount of brain activation and involves far more areas of the brain than driving on a straight road or other maneuvers.

Most serious traffic accidents occur when drivers are making a left-hand turn at a busy intersection.

When those drivers are also talking on a hands-free cell phone, "that could be the most dangerous thing they ever do on the road," said Dr. Tom Schweizer, a researcher at St. Michael's Hospital.

Researchers led by Dr. Schweizer tested healthy young drivers operating a novel driving simulator equipped with a steering wheel, brake pedal and accelerator inside a high-powered functional MRI. All previous studies on distracted driving have used just a joy-stick or trackball or else patients passively watching scenarios on a screen.

Immersing a driving simulator with a fully functional steering wheel and pedals in an MRI at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre allowed researchers to map in real time which parts of the brain were activated or deactivated as the simulator took them through increasingly difficult driving maneuvers.

Eyes hooked up to the tail can help blinded tadpoles see, researchers say.

These findings could help guide therapies involving natural or artificial implants, scientists added.

A major roadblock when it comes to treating blindness and other sensory disorders is how much remains unknown about the nervous system and its ability to adapt to change. To learn more about the relationship between the body and the brain, researchers wanted to see how capable the brain was of interpreting sensory data from abnormal "ectopic" locations from which it normally does not receive signals.

Blood has long been the focus of research -- but it still offers some surprises. A new study reveals that plasma, the fluid in which blood cells travel, behaves a bit like a solid on small scales.

Blood is a suspension of cells inside a liquid. As it flows, it delivers vital oxygen and nutrients to all parts of the body. By better understanding blood plasma -- a solution mostly made up of water that transports red and white blood cells, platelets, salts, proteins, and fats -- researchers can more accurately model the motion of blood within the human body and use that information to help develop artificial substitutes.

On a small scale, whole blood, like ketchup, acts elastic. Consider that scourge of restaurant diners: ketchup in a glass bottle. You shake and shake the bottle, but like a solid mass, the stubborn substance refuses to budge. Finally, the ketchup goes into fluid mode all at once, flooding the plate in red.

Scientists previously attributed this behavior to the blood cells floating in the plasma, not to the plasma itself. And tests suggested that plasma was indeed a normal fluid, exhibiting no side-to-side elasticity.

However, not all scientists agreed with the assumption that plasma was normal. With the rise of affordable high-speed cameras, they could attempt new tests of plasma's elongational elasticity. And one such experiment, published in Physical Review Letters, has shown that plasma is not as simple as once believed.

Long Beach, San Francisco - Speaking from the prestigious TED Conference in Long Beach Wednesday, Sausalito activist Stewart Brand said scientists are developing the ability to reassemble an extinct animal's genome, and even recreate the animal itself.

Brand, who gained fame after he campaigned to have the original NASA space photos of earth published, and subsequently created the Whole Earth Catalog, said Wednesday that "de-extinction" could be used to help restore organisms and habitats damaged human activity, according to a report in the Marin Independent Journal.

A team of Harvard geneticists are currently working to bring back the passenger pigeon, which has been extinct since 1914, according to the TED website. The passenger pigeon is considered a keystone species because it aided the survival of the buffalo, according to TED. Researchers believe it may now be possible to alter the genetic makeup of a close relative, the band-tailed pigeon, to re-engineer the passenger pigeon.

Scientific advances have led experts to pioneer the 'virtopsy', a non-invasive imaging process which can reveal details conventional methods would have missed

Anyone who has spent any time in a courtroom knows how easy it is for a skilled defence lawyer to plant doubt in the mind of a jury. Even in a relatively straightforward case, such as a hit and run, jurors are frequently presented with such a confusing array of photographic and forensic evidence that it is very difficult to know what has taken place and who may be at fault.

But what if there was a kind of technology that could reconstruct the crime scene in 3D and match it to other forensic imaging data? Furthermore, what if this technology could see through skin, bone and even soft tissue to detect bullet fragments overlooked by traditional pathologists equipped only with a scalpel and the human eye?

That is the promise of virtual autopsy - or "virtopsy" - a radical new approach to forensic imaging developed in Switzerland that is fast winning converts in Britain and elsewhere.

Just as forensic pathologists at the University of Leicester recently used computed tomography (CT) to identify the two fatal blows to the Plantagenet king Richard III, so a team of Zurich-based radiologists and pathologists is now using similar CT and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology to help solve modern-day murders and crimes.

The difference is that the Swiss team, led by Professor Michael Thali of the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Zurich, has gone a stage further, not only using X-ray imaging to create scalpel-free 3D images of intact cadavers but also building a "Virtobot" capable of carrying out precise postmortem tissue sampling - and all without exposing pathologists to harmful radiation or bodily contaminants.

It's a significant finding in the search for signs of extraterrestrial life.

According to astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope, evidence of prebiotic molecules have been discovered in interstellar space - the first such evidence unearthed. The finding, according to experts, could increase the odds of discovering life outside of our own solar system.

Among the prebiotic molecules discovered by a team of Virginia astronomy students includes a molecule called ethanamine, which is thought to produce adenine, one of the four nucleobases that form the rungs of DNA. Another newly-discovered molecule, called cyanomethanimine, is thought to have a role in the formation of the amino acid alanine - a key process in biology. Laboratories at the University of Virginia and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics measured radio emission from cyanomethanimine and ethanamine, and the frequency patterns from those molecules then were matched to publicly-available data produced by a survey done with the GBT from 2008 to 2011, researcher said in a statement released to the press Thursday.

A ring of radiation previously unknown to science fleetingly surrounded Earth last year before being virtually annihilated by a powerful interplanetary shock wave, scientists say.

NASA's twin Van Allen space probes, which are studying the Earth's radiation belts, made the cosmic find. The surprising discovery - a new, albeit temporary, radiation belt around Earth - reveals how much remains unknown about outer space, even those regions closest to the planet, researchers added.

After humanity began exploring space, the first major find made there were the Van Allen radiation belts, zones of magnetically trapped, highly energetic charged particles first discovered in 1958.

"They were something we thought we mostly understood by now, the first discovery of the Space Age," said lead study author Daniel Baker, a space scientist at the University of Colorado.

Meteorite hunters at the bottom of the world bagged a rare find this southern summer: a 40-pound (18 kilogram) chunk of extraterrestrial rock.

A team from Belgium and Japan discovered the hefty meteorite as the members drove across the East Antarctic plateau on snowmobiles. Initial tests show it is an ordinary chondrite, the most common type of meteorite found on Earth, Vinciane Debaille, a geologist from Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, said in a statement.

"This is the biggest meteorite found in East Antarctica for 25 years," Debaille said. "This is something very exceptional. When you find such a meteorite on Earth, it means that when it was in the sky, it was much larger."

In 1905, Albert Einstein published his theory of Special Relativity - showing that wristwatches of two observers in motion relative to one another will measure time differently. Since then, our human concept of time has gotten slippery. It's no longer possible to think of time as ticking along at a constant rate since the universe was born, separate from our own human perceptions.

Studies have borne out the idea that we all perceive time differently. For example, in 2001, two scientists at University College London conducted research showing that our internal clocks don't always match either. My internal clock doesn't tick at the same rate as yours. Everyone's sense of time is different and, at least in part, dependent on what our senses are telling us about the external world.

The UCL scientists - Misha B. Ahrens and Maneesh Sahani - wanted to answer the question, "Where does our sense of time come from?" Their research indicated that we humans use our senses - for example, the sense of sight - to help keep track of short intervals of time.

According to Ahrens and Sahani, we humans have learned to expect our sensory inputs to change at a particular average rate. They said that comparing the change we see to this average value helps us judge how much time has passed, and refines our internal timekeeping.