matterhacker

This story from ABC appeared on the Digg front page today.  It’s about an autistic woman who has proven that autistic persons can communicate quite readily and intelligently.  All that she needed was a method of communication that she could work with.  In this case her parents got together with a psychologist to design a keyboard with pictures and symbols that allowed her to type out what she wanted to say.  Great read!  It reminds me of silentmiaow, her blog and youtube entries.  She too has severe autism and has found typing to be the only way to effectively communicate with non-autistic people.  Amazing to hear the thoughts, emotions and opinions of people with autism.  People that society thought of as unintelligent in the past.

This story popped up on Slashdot today. Two artists have played back the recordings of brainwave activity of people in REM sleep on robots. Essentially the robot will act out the “in-dream” actions of the sleeping person. Pretty cool! Original story is here. A link to the video is below:

Cool… improving memory via electrode stimulation. A pacemaker for the memory center for the brain.

Wow… I thought multitasking would make you sharper. It seems that it just screws the regions of the brain required for higher-level thinking and learning. See this article from The Atlantic. Haha! They give a great example of multitasking… and I quote:

While the president continued talking on the phone (Ms. Lewinsky understood that the caller was a Member of Congress or a Senator), she performed oral sex on him.

WIRED Science on PBS online has a cool segment on how human sensory inout can be rewired. They show how neuroscientists have successfully helped a blind man see by using a camera to stimulate his tounge and how they rewired the brain of a woman who lost her sense of balance by using input from an accelerometer.

Came across this neat story from WIRED about Harvard scientists trying to map the human brain. Looks like a nice idea applying automation (a la genomics) to mapping of brain tissue.

ATLUM uses a lathe and specialized knife to create long, thin strips of brain cells that can be imaged by an electron microscope. Software will eventually montage the images, creating an ultrahigh-resolution 3-D reconstruction of the mouse brain, allowing scientists to see features only 50 nanometers across.

Ha! Sounds like some automated alien brain slicing device straight out of a sci-fi movie! Anyways, it’s quite an interesting reverse engineering problem. It seems that automated techniques like those used in bio-informatics are being applied in really unique ways to bio imaging.