Bionic technology is removing physical barriers faced by disabled people while raising profound questions of what it is to be human. From DIY prosthetics realised through 3D printing technology to customised AI-driven limbs, science is at the forefront of many life-enhancing innovations.
Researchers have created a way for artificial neuronal networks to communicate with biological neuronal networks. The new system converts artificial electrical spiking signals to a visual pattern than is then used to entrain the real neurons via optogenetic stimulation of the network. This advance will be important for future neuroprosthetic devices that replace damages neurons with artificial neuronal circuitry.
A prosthesis is an artificial device that replaces an injured or missing part of the body. You can easily imagine a stereotypical pirate with a wooden leg or Luke Skywalker’s famous robotic hand. Less dramatically, think of old-school prosthetics like glasses and contact lenses that replace the natural lenses in our eyes. Now try to imagine a prosthesis that replaces part of a damaged brain. What could artificial brain matter be like? How would it even work?
Creating neuroprosthetic technology is the goal of an international team led by by the Ikerbasque Researcher Paolo Bonifazi from Biocruces Health Research Institute (Bilbao, Spain), and Timothée Levi from Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo and from IMS lab, University of Bordeaux. Although several types of artificial neurons have been developed, none have been truly practical for neuroprostheses. One of the biggest problems is that neurons in the brain communicate very precisely, but electrical output from the typical electrical neural network is unable to target specific neurons. To overcome this problem, the team converted the electrical signals to light. As Levi explains, “advances in optogenetic technology allowed us to precisely target neurons in a very small area of our biological neuronal network.”
A Royal Astronomical Society press release revealed that during the National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) 2022, currently being hosted at the University of Warwick, scientists will announce the discovery of 40,000 ring galaxies discovered using a “cyborg” approach — a combination of human and machine intelligence.
The work will be presented by Dr. Mike Walmsley of the University of Manchester and the Galaxy Zoo collaboration — a decade-long citizen science project on the Zooniverse platform.
Volunteers for the Galaxy Zoo project look through pictures of galaxies and classify them by shape and features. Studying the morphology of galaxies is an important step in understanding how they interact with their surroundings. In the words of Galaxy Zoo’s “About” section:
The World Robot Conference 2022 was held in Beijing. Due to the ongoing offline pandemic, only Chinese robotics companies were represented, and the rest of the world joined in the online format. But the Chinese booths were also, as always, a lot to see. We gathered for you all the most interesting things from the largest robot exhibition in one video!
0:00 Intro. 0:30 Chinese robotics market. 1:06 EX Robots. 2:38 Dancing humanoid robot. 3:37 Unitree Robotics. 4:55 Underwater bionic robot. 5:23 Bionic arm and anthropomorphic robot. 5:43 Mobile two-wheeled robot. 6:40 Industrial robots. 7:04 Reconnaissance Robot. 8:05 Logistics Solutions. 9:31 Intelligent Platform. 10:03 Robot++ 10:41 Robots in Medicine. 10:58 PCR tests with robots. 11:16 Robotic surgical system. #prorobots #robots #robot #futuretechnologies #robotics.
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It works by copying what happens in the hippocampus—a seahorse-shaped region deep in the brain that plays a crucial role in memory. The brain structure not only helps us form short-term memories but also appears to direct memories to other regions for long-term storage.
For more than 10 years, Theodore Berger and Dong Song at the University of Southern California and their colleagues have been developing a way to mimic this process. Their idea is to use brain electrodes to understand the electrical patterns of activity that occur when memories are encoded, and then use those same electrodes to fire similar patterns of activity.
We’ve all heard of Terminator, Blade Runner, and other science fiction about cyborgs. But how far is reality from fiction? Can scientists transform humans into machine-like creatures, stronger, smarter and, who knows, even immortal?
Join us for a unique conversation about our transhumanist future with neuroscientist Ed Boyden, leader of the Synthetic Neurobiology Group and associate professor of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the MIT Media Lab and McGovern Institute for Brain Research; humanist Mark O’Connell, journalist and author of To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death; and physicist Marcelo Gleiser, director of the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement at Dartmouth College.
In recent years, roboticists and material scientists worldwide have been trying to create artificial systems that resemble human body parts and reproduce their functions. These include artificial skins, protective layers that could also enhance the sensing capabilities of robots.
Researchers at Donghua University in China and the Jülich Centre for Neutron Science (JCNS) in Germany have recently developed a new and highly promising artificial ionic skin based on a self-healable elastic nanomesh, an interwoven structure that resembles human skin. This artificial skin, introduced in a paper published in Nature Communications, is soft, fatigue-free and self-healing.
“As we know, the skin is the largest organ in the human body, which acts as both a protective layer and sensory interface to keep our body healthy and perceptive,” Shengtong Sun, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “With the rapid development of artificial intelligence and soft robotics, researchers are currently trying to coat humanoid robots with an ‘artificial skin’ that replicates all the mechanical and sensory properties of human skin, so that they can also perceive the everchanging external environment like us.”
