July 18th, 2009
Strike a Pose, Cyborg!
Frankenbrains
A recent study in Current Biology by Alessandro Farné and Lucilla Cardinali of the University of Claude Bernard in Lyon, France suggests that the brain can incorporate cyborg additions — a cyborg arm or other body part — into its body schema.
July 11th, 2009
Ritual Abuse
Frankenbrains
There is a great deal of evidence supporting the existence of ritual abuse crimes as a worldwide phenomenon...The psychological abuse is devastating and involves the use of ritual/indoctrination, which includes mind control techniques and mind altering drugs....
July 8th, 2009
Computers may be able to ‘read’ thoughts
Frankenbrains
It sounds like something from a science fiction movie: Sensors are surgically inserted in the brain to understand what you're thinking. Machines that can speak, move or process information — based on the fleeting thoughts in a person's imagination.
July 6th, 2009
CIA behavior modification: Project Bluebird
Frankenbrains
Though exceedingly few people are aware of this, the CIA became quite adept at controlling and manipulating human behavior in disturbing ways over 50 years ago...It's time that the public be informed of these serious matters, so that we can all understand what's happening and work to stop the abuses.
July 1st, 2009
Stanford Team Re-Engineering Brain Cells to be Controlled by Lasers
Frankenbrains
The genes which have been virally injected into existing cells are derived from light-sensitive algae and some salt-dwelling extremophiles (lifeforms capable of surviving in environments fatal to almost everything else.)...you end up with a brain structure that can be turned on or off by pulses of yellow or blue light...
June 27th, 2009
A neuroscience arms race could lead to guilt-free soldiers
Frankenbrains
In a recent defence intelligence agency report, leading scientists were asked to cast their minds forward 20 years and describe how neuroscience might be used by the military. They described "pharmacological land mines", performance boosting drugs and electronic devices that make it impossible to lie.
April 14th, 2009
Virtual reality via nanobot injection? Ray Kurzweil says it’s the future
Frankenbrains
Virtual reality has long promised a way to create an immersive illusion so convincing you can’t tell the fake from the real. Futurist Ray Kurzweil says it’s that kind of virtual reality will make virtual travel possible. Not in the way you might expect, with a super-realistic display creating faux imagery on a screen or a pair of goggles. But instead by injecting nanobots into your brain.
April 12th, 2009
The Messy Future of Memory-Editing Drugs
Frankenbrains
The development of a drug that controls a chemical used to form memories sparked heady scientific and philosophical speculation this week. A lot of discussion is based on the false premise that they'll work as well as they would in a science fiction story. In practice, well-studied, well-understood drugs like aspirin have side effects that can be annoying or even dangerous. I think the same thing will go for memory editing...Current research seems to suggest that it can be pretty specific, but there will be side effects. It may not even be that you forget other memories. Small, false memories could be created. And we're probably not going to be able to predict that before we actually try them.
April 5th, 2009
Robot Makes Scientific Discovery All by Itself
Frankenbrains
For the first time, a robotic system has made a novel scientific discovery with virtually no human intellectual input...After analyzing the data and running follow-up experiments — it can design and initiate over a thousand new experiments each day — Adam had uncovered three genes that together coded for an orphan enzyme. King's group confirmed the novel findings by hand.
March 29th, 2009
Creating an Atlas of the Human Mind
Frankenbrains
With $55 million, a collection of frozen human brains and robots capable of processing 192 brain slices a day, the Allen Brain Institute is attempting to do the impossible: systematically map out the expression patterns of more than 20,000 genes that make our grey matter tick.
February 26th, 2009
Antidepressants May Thwart Quest for True Love
Frankenbrains
Antidepressant drugs, already known to cause sexual side effects, may also suppress the basic human emotions of love and romance.
Brain-Machine Interfaces Make for Tricky Ethics
Frankenbrains
Direct connections from brains to computers may someday help free paralyzed people from the constraints of their bodies...But as they become more refined, brain-machine interfaces will almost certainly be used for non-therapeutic purposes — and with that expansion comes profound ethical questions.
February 16th, 2009
Heart drug can erase bad memories, say Dutch scientists
Frankenbrains
Dr Daniel Sokol, a lecturer in medical ethics at St George's, University of London, said: 'Removing bad memories is not like removing a wart. It will change our personal identity since who we are is linked to our memories. We must reflect on the knock-on effects that this will have on individuals, society and our sense of humanity.'
December 8th, 2008
Robo-Soldiers? No Thanks, Top Sergeants Say
Frankenbrains
Collectively, they’ve served in the U.S. Army for over 140 years. Altogether, they’ve spent a total of 104 months in the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones. And not one of five command sergeants major who spoke on "Technology and the Warfighter" at the Army Science Conference believe autonomous robots — as opposed to today's teleoperated systems — are in the cards any time soon.
December 7th, 2008
Pentagon hires British scientist to help build robot soldiers that 'won't commit war crimes'
Frankenbrains
The US Army and Navy have both hired experts in the ethics of building machines to prevent the creation of an amoral Terminator-style killing machine that murders indiscriminately.
November 26th, 2008
Rat's Neurons (in dish) learn how to fly an Aeroplane
Frankenbrains
A FASCINATING video about scientists who are taking a random group of individual rat neurons, hooking them up to a computer via electrodes, and then watching as the neurons eventually form into a thinking brain which is able to fly an airplane simulator.
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