Gizmorama
April 11, 2011
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Good Morning,
Technology gets crazier and crazier each week it seems;
bridging the gaps between reality and movie esc science
fiction. In the first article, researchers test a new tech-
nology that allows people to manipulate computers with their
minds. This is one article that is sure to inspire further
inquiry.
Until Next Time,
Erin
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Patients control computer by thought
ST. LOUIS - U.S. researchers say patients with a temporary
surgical implant have, for the first time, used regions of
the brain that control speech to "talk" to a computer. Sci-
entists at Washington University School of Medicine in St.-
Louis say the implants allowed patients to manipulate a
cursor on a computer screen simply by saying or thinking of
a particular sound. "There are many directions we could take
this, including development of technology to restore com-
munication for patients who have lost speech due to brain
injury or damage to their vocal cords or airway," researcher
Eric C. Leuthardt said. Scientists have more typically
programmed temporary implants, known as brain-computer
interfaces, to detect activity in the brain's motor networks
that control muscle movements, a university release said
Thursday. "That makes sense when you're trying to use these
devices to restore lost mobility," Leuthardt said. "But that
has the potential to be inefficient for restoration of a
loss of communication." Leuthardt and his colleagues used
the implants on areas of the brain that control speech to
analyze what the brain was doing when patients said or
thought of four sounds -- oo as in few, e as in see, a as
in say and a as in hat. The brainwave patterns representing
the sounds were identified and the interface programmed to
recognize them, allowing patients to learn quickly to control
a computer cursor by thinking or saying the appropriate sound.
"We can distinguish both spoken sounds and the patient imag-
ining saying a sound, so that means we are truly starting to
read the language of thought," Leuthardt said.
NASA spacecraft join in cosmic observation
GREENBELT, Md. - NASA says three of its orbiting spacecraft
have teamed up to study a puzzling cosmic blast of energy,
one that has lasted more than a week. The Swift Gamma Burst
Mission spacecraft, the Hubble Space Telescope and the
Chandra X-ray Observatory have been observing a phenomenon
scientists say is brighter, longer-lasting and more variable
than anything they've seen before, a NASA release said Thurs-
day. Astronomers say the unusual blast is likely the result
of a star wandering too close to its galaxy's central black
hole where intense gravitation tidal are tearing the star
apart, and the in-falling gas is streaming toward the hole.
The model suggests the spinning black hole has formed an
outflowing jet of X-rays and gamma rays along its rotational
axis that is pointed in our direction. "The best explanation
at the moment is that we happen to be looking down the barrel
of this jet," said Andrew Levan at the University of Warwick
in the United Kingdom, who led the Chandra observations.
The Swift spacecraft detected the source in the constellation
Draco March 28. An image taken by Hubble April 4 pinpoints
the source of the explosion at the center of a galaxy about
3.8 billion light-years from Earth. That same day the Chandra
X-ray Observatory made a 4-hourlong exposure of the puzzling
source. "We know of objects in our own galaxy that can pro-
duce repeated bursts, but they are thousands to millions of
times less powerful than the bursts we are seeing now,"
Andrew Fruchter at the Space Telescope Science Institute in
Baltimore said. "This is truly extraordinary."
Study: Fossil reefs give clue to future
MIAMI - U.S. researchers say studies of the geological rec-
ord of ancient marine reefs could provide insight into how
reefs may respond to climate change. Scientists at the Uni-
versity of Miami studied the fossil records of coral reefs
in the Caribbean to characterize the nature of these eco-
systems during the Pliocene epoch more than 2.5 million
years ago. Estimates of carbon dioxide and global temper-
atures of that period are close to the environmental condi-
tions predicted for the next 100 years, James Klaus, UM
assistant professor of geology, said. "If the coming century
truly is a return to the Pliocene conditions, corals will
likely survive, while well-developed reefs may not," he
said. "This could be detrimental to the fish and marine
species that rely on the reef structure for their habitat."
The Pliocene epoch was characterized by a great diversity of
free-living corals that lived unattached to the seafloor, he
said. While these free-living corals would have been well
suited to ocean conditions projected for this century, modern
reef-building coral fauna, which must colonize the ocean
floor and then build up into reefs, may not, UM researcher
Donald McNeill said. "Like the Pliocene, we might expect
shallow reefs to be increasingly patchy with lower topo-
graphic relief," he said. "Rising levels of carbon dioxide
will lower the pH in the oceans, a process known as ocean
acidification, and will make it difficult for corals to build
their limestone skeletons."
Possible new elementary particle described
BATAVIA, Ill. - U.S. particle physicists say they may have
observed a new elementary particle or force of nature but
admit it may be merely a statistical aberration. Researchers
at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois said
if the results are confirmed, they could require the first
significant change in what is known as the standard model of
physics in more than five decades, the Los Angeles Times re-
ported Thursday. "If this thing is real, it is a new type of
very heavy particle that is not one of the ones theorists
have been sitting around thinking about," physicist Michael
Witherell of the University of California, Santa Barbara,
told the Times. "It would be very heavy, very interesting and
very fundamental. It would turn over our understanding of
particle physics." However, the Fermilab researchers say
there is about a 1-in-1,000 chance the results are due to a
random statistical fluctuation, so they are not yet claiming
a discovery. "That's no more than what physicists tend to
call an 'observation' or an 'indication,'" Caltech physicist
Harvey Newman said. For the finding to be considered real,
further study would have to reduce the chances of a statist-
ical fluke to about 1 in a million, scientists said. "We will
know this summer when we double the data sets and see if it
is still there," Fermilab physicist Rob Roser, spokesman for
the project, said.
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