In the quest to unravel the way the brain works (any brain, we can learn a lot from a mouse brain that applies to our own brain) researchers are looking for better and better ways to detect electrical signals exchanged by neurones. Indeed, the electrical activity is crucial to brain …
Read More »Looking at thoughts
Progress has been amazing in technologies to peek inside the living brain to observe its inner working. Yet we are still far from really following what is going on and in particular to relate the firing of neurones to specific stimuli. There is so much going on in our brain …
Read More »Beyond CRISPR, leveraging on Artificial Intelligence
The code of life, the DNA, can be sequenced in a matter of days (that is our human code, there are “shorter codes” like the ones of some viruses but also much longer ones, like the one of a plant, the Paris Japonica, that is 50 times longer than our …
Read More »The thin, fuzzy, line between awareness and consciousness
Philosophers have been debating about awareness, consciousness and for long time have asserted that only us, humans, are conscious (whilst all living things need to have some sort of awareness to keep living…). Today we know that it is not just us, many, actually most, animal species have some degree …
Read More »From Smart to Intelligent Cities – Part II
OK, so we can expect a smart city to become more and more “imbibed” with IoTs, hundreds of millions of them connected through a nervous infrastructure supported by a ubiquitous communications fabric (5G) with plenty of software that makes sense of data and orchestrate the response of the city, seen …
Read More »A virtual voyage inside the brain
The amount of data that is becoming available on the brain, both the human one and the ones of those animals, like the mouse, that are used to study brain structures keeps growing on a daily base and has already reached staggering levels. There are now hundreds of terabytes of …
Read More »Looking at “how” neurones connect
The number of tools at scientists disposal to look into the brain in their attempt to understand it keeps growing. Projects like “the Human Connectome” are trying to map all connections among the billions and billions of neurones and eventually they will succeed. However the mapping resulting from those projects …
Read More »Probing inside the brain
Science progresses thanks to data. Yes, ideas and imagination play and important role but these are stimulated by observational data ad have to be confirmed by observational data. The problem we face in unraveling the brain is its huge complexity, the amazing connectivity among its different components making it extremely …
Read More »How does a machine think?
We are so used at doing most of our daily activity that we seldom stop to reflect on what goes on in our head. Our senses feed our brain with data and it is up to the brain to make “sense” and take action (actually this is not always true, …
Read More »Watching in the brain … what you are watching
What seemed pure science fiction just 5 years ago is now becoming a matter of perfecting technology to make it better: seeing what you are seeing by looking at your brain activity. Researchers at Purdue University have demonstrated “mind reading” decoding technology. Three volunteers’ brains were monitored using fMRI -functional …
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