From an article in New Scientist entitled, I fecal matter you not, “Rise of the rat-brained robots”:

. . . the disembodied neurons are communicating, sending electrical signals to one another just as they do in a living creature. We know this because the network of neurons is connected at the base of the pot to 80 electrodes, and the voltages sparked by the neurons are displayed on a computer screen.

Normally this kind of story is the province of furtive Wetmachiner Gary Gray, but Gary hasn't posted anything here since his wedding day some months ago. Which could mean anything, just say'n. In the meantime I'll do my best to assume his wetmachine slack. I'm proud to say I was his Best Man, and the attendant responsibilities last a lifetime, what-what?

And furthermore, long dormant wetmechanics have been known to pop up and chirp, after a long sojourn underground, just like N-year locusts. With Greg resurgent, can Gary be far behind? Or David? Or, yegods, Peg or Christian? My advice? Stay tuned. Rat brains in jars controlling machinery have prortent! I swear I believe it!

Technology Review has an article about a paper in Public Library of Science Biology titled Solid-State, Dye-Labeled DNA Detects Volatile Compounds in the Vapor Phase. In other words, DNA is being used as just a polymer, not the Stuff of Life. Why is this cool?

No self-respecting molecular biologist would have thought of this. Instead, a systems neuroscientist working on creating an electronic nose was thinking on the problem of sensor development. The nose worked on biological principles, identifying odors not by specific sensors (as with a CO₂ sensor), but rather by the patterns of activity on an array of sensors. They were working with sensors made of polymers doped with compounds with fluorescent properties that would change in the presence of specific, target odorant molecules. Developing new sensors has been a completely empirical process for anyone in the electronic nose business. How to speed it up? DNA.

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Human cloning work moves away from the embryo, but the reasons aren't moral.


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Hack a day had this link to a cyborg sausage that talks. It's creepy and amusing at the same time. The Frankenstein stitches up the back of the sausage were particularly appropriate.

Well, this one is just.... out there. Researchers at the Univeristy of Florida managed to grow neurons from a rat's brain in a jar, and have it control a flight simulator.

It appears the primary goal of the research was to determine how the brain processes information. So, this really isn't a mad scientist trying to create a race of rat-brained killer robots. At least, not yet.

(Link lifted from BoingBoing.)

Reuters is announcing that

Professor Ehud Shapiro and researchers at Israel's Weizmann Institute constructed the world's smallest biomolecular computer a few years ago.

Now they have programmed it to analyse biological information to detect and treat prostate cancer and a form of lung cancer in laboratory experiments.

“We've taken our earlier molecular computer and augmented it with an input and output module. Together the computer can diagnose a disease and in response produce a drug for the disease in a test tube,” Shapiro told Reuters.
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Once again physicists have made the great biological leap. It took physicists to design and carry out the experiments that unlocked neurophysiology. Now a group of physicists, biophysicists and a pathologist have published a flux balance analysis of all the metabolic pathways in our favorite bacteria, E. coli.

In a time when genetic and protein data are being generated at a remarkable rate, few people in biology have been able to come out of reductionism and into systemic thinking. The sheer amount of data is daunting, and excluding the biophysicists, many biologists don't use (or need) math harder than ANOVA or a two-tailed T test.

For those interested in more of the crunchy details, the abstract from PubMed is below. [Read More!]

I first heard the term neuroeconomics in a review of Decisions, Uncertainty, and the Brain: The Science of Neuroeconomics by Paul W. Glimcher in the journal Acumen . (Another review can be found at human-nature.com.) My interest piqued by this new (to me) turn of phrase, a-Googling I did go, and turned up neuroeconomics.com, a blog run by Kevin McCabe, who runs the Behavioral and Neuroeconomics laboratory at George Mason University.

Like the pure psychoanalysts who shuddered to find their theories applied to advertising, I find myself discomfited at seeing my own interest in how the brain works specifically applied to matters of money.