The Rasterbator is a web service which creates huge rasterized pictures out of relatively small image files. The pictures can be assembled into extremely cool looking posters up to 5 meters in size!
Cyberkinetics founder Dr. John Donoghue, a Brown University neuroscientist, attracted attention with research on monkeys that was published in 2002 in the journal Nature.
Three rhesus monkeys were given implants, which were first used to record signals from their motor cortex - an area of the brain that controls movement - as they manipulated a joystick with their hands. Those signals were then used to develop a program that enabled one of the monkeys to continue moving a computer cursor with its brain.
The idea is not to stimulate the mind but rather to map neural activity so as to discern when the brain is signaling a desire to make a particular physical movement.
"We're going to say to a paralyzed patient, 'imagine moving your hand six inches to the right,'" Surgenor said.
Then, he said, researchers will try to identify the brain activity associated with that desire. Someday, that capacity could feed into related devices, such as a robotic arm, that help patients act on that desire.
It's misleading to say such technologies "read minds," said Dr. Jonathan Wolpaw, of the New York State Department of Health, who is conducting similar research. Instead, they train minds to recognize a new pattern of cause and effect, and adapt.
"What happens is you provide the brain with the opportunity to develop a new skill," he said.
Translate and refine the initial abstract diagrams into designed environments in such a way that the essence and clarity of the original diagram is retained in the designed environment.
The link above is to a small gallery of pictures taken of work I was doing at TMSI prior to being assigned as their laser technician. These were controls for truckloaders and conveyor systems that have been installed in newspapers across the country. I also wired and tested quite a few of their Compass® newspaper stackers before plant operations were closed in Ohio and moved to Georgia. I'm one of three people left still working for them here in their Cleveland area Field Service office.
So what explains the LSD drought? The best explanation is a bust, a really big bust. The DEA claims it reduced the LSD supply by "95 percent" with two arrests in rural Kansas in November 2000. Clyde Apperson and William Leonard Pickard were charged with and eventually convicted of possession and conspiracy to distribute LSD. According to court testimony, the DEA seized the largest operable LSD laboratory in agency history, as well as 91 pounds of LSD and precursor compounds for the potential manufacture of nearly 27 pounds more. If you define a dose of LSD as 100 micrograms, Apperson and Pickard had around 400 million hits in stock. At the more common dosage level of 20 micrograms, the two were sitting on 2 billion hits. Apperson got 30 years in prison, and Pickard got two life sentences. The Kansas bust marked the third time in four years that the DEA had arrested Apperson and Pickard on LSD lab charges.
BERKELEY, CA — Researchers in the Materials Sciences Division (MSD) of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working with crystal-growing teams at Cornell University and Japan's Ritsumeikan University, have learned that the band gap of the semiconductor indium nitride is not 2 electron volts (2 eV) as previously thought, but instead is a much lower 0.7 eV.
The serendipitous discovery means that a single system of alloys incorporating indium, gallium, and nitrogen can convert virtually the full spectrum of sunlight -- from the near infrared to the far ultraviolet -- to electrical current.
"It's as if nature designed this material on purpose to match the solar spectrum," says MSD's Wladek Walukiewicz, who led the collaborators in making the discovery. (more)
