By way of decrying a society that left its citizens unbearably restrained, Edith Wharton describes how in New York in the 1870s, women would order dresses from their Paris dressmakers and then leave them in tissue paper at least two years before wearing them in public; the thought of showing them "in advance of the fashion" was unforgivably vulgar. Social life has changed, but cultural life seems just as restricted now – even Animal Collective are held back by trends that seem a couple of years old (and that they helped to invent). When I think back on 2009, I’ll first remember how our impoverished aesthetic generation repeatedly scraped the resin from the cultural trash barrel. Every second person is wearing neon leggings, and the ones who aren’t rock a ‘70s aesthetic, with high-waisted jeans and moccasins. Christmas sweaters are getting impossible to find at the thrift store. Ska revival. Garage rock revival. It never ends.Read More ...
A straight shot west out of Boston on I-90 will carry you, in two hours or less, to Western Massachusetts, where the country still looks like it did twenty or even 40 years ago: college towns, I-91 tracing the same lazy ladder from Springfield up through Holyoke and Northampton, Amherst and Deerfield. Out there it's taken for granted that the houses will be drafty, the winters uniformly long, and that, on any given trip to the local supermarket, one might spot Thurston or Lou or Kim or J, on-and-off locals for more than twenty years. {audio}http://www.archive.org/download/DinosaurJrDrawings/07Drawerings_64kb.mp3{/audio} ... DraweringsRead More ...
The Ex are one of those rare bands that, despite being around for 25 years, have neither gone soft nor stagnated. The 23 tracks on this album all date from their first decade of existence (1980-1990), and if you compare it with recent milestones like Starter Alternator and Turn, you’ll see that while many of the Ex’s virtues are long standing, much has changed. The Ex grew out of Amsterdam’s once-fertile squatters’ subculture, and have always been politically conscious; Singles. Period. includes screeds that oppose American cultural hegemony, Dutch apathy, and eugenics. Their most recent album Turn likewise includes protests against globalization, consumerism, and cultural erosion, but its lyrics are quite nuanced and in touch with the grey areas of the issues when compared with the black and white prescription of 1981’s “Weapons For El Salvador”: .............. {audio}http://www.theex.nl/mp3/The%20Ex%20-%20Trash.mp3{/audio} ... TrashRead More ...
For just over 10 years, London's Guapo has been working in the world of avant and progressive rock. The band's past is a bit hard to track with its numerous lineup changes and guest musicians. The most recent change in roster was the resignation of Matthew Thompson, the founding member of Guapo, which occurred just before the release of 2005's Black Oni. The departure of Thompson has left Guapo with percussionist David Smith and multi-instrumentalist Daniel O'Sullivan. Though O'Sullivan is by no means a founding member of the band, but he was essential in honing the sound on Guapo's last two LPs: Five Suns and Black Oni. These two albums have been pivotal in building Guapo's following of fans, so it's hard not to credit O'Sullivan as an asset to the band.... {audio}http://www.neurotrecordings.com/artists/guapo/audio/Guapo-The%20Selenotrope.mp3 {/audio} ... The SelenotropeRead More ...
A live album can be many things: a candid snapshot, a footnote to a scene, or even just a thrifty alternative to studio time. Antlers, a collection of live Bastro recordings from 1991, is the rarest kind of live album: it illuminates a side of the band that, in turn, casts their previous work in a new light as well.“1991 has been called the year that punk broke. Some of it broke into the mainstream, but some broke into more irregular shards.” David Grubbs’s observation, from the liner notes to Antlers, could also describe the varied musical paths that led from his former band Squirrel Bait to the disparate ’90s groups he and his ex-bandmates went on to found: Slint, Palace Brothers, King Kong, Bitch Magnet, the For Carnation, Tortoise, and of course, Bastro.Read More ...
LIMB is an archival release of some material recorded from 1980-1983, from the early days of Foetus and pre-Foetus. Some of the pieces here have been previously released on the compilation albums. Parts have been released on various single b-sides. Some were excavated from old cassettes and some of it was reconstructed or re-edited from compositions on cassette. One piece is constructed from an organ part written in 1982, which I took the liberty of finishing in 2008. These pieces were made before the introduction of MIDI and sampling technology. {audio}http://brainwashed.com/common/sounds/mp3/foetus-limb-te_deum.mp3{/audio} ....Te DeumRead More ...
Doing justice to Nisht Azoy is a tricky affair, not least because Black Ox Orkestar stand alone, making comparisons and associations nearly impossible. The use of gypsy melodies on the later Firewater albums also comes to mind. Adopting and reinterpreting Jewish diasporic music, Black Ox Orkestar's second album moves through original songs, traditionals and compositions based on folk songs and ballads. The selections are masterful, as is the playing, whether eliciting joy with dance rhythms and singing or delving into slow, sad evocations of melancholy...... {audio}http://www.southern.net/southern/band/BLAOX/sounds/CST29_08_toyte_goyes_in_shineln.mp3{/audio} ....toyte goyes in shinelnRead More ...
To those who detest the comic-bookish faux personas invented by electro musicians, and who think that being cryptic is tantamount to snobbery, the Detroit duo Adult. may be one of the most frustrating bands on the planet. Their paranoiac lyrics and resistance to celebrity can make them difficult to embrace. But their world of anonymous, implied violence is just as humorous as it is vague, and at the end of the night it's meant to be fun. Even as their music remains sterile and distant, artists and people can't help but to seep into their music. As with all the electro artists who "hide their identity," a sense of humor and adventure is helpful in confronting Adult.’s music. Adam Lee Miller and Nicola Kuperus (Adult.) recently answered some interview questions for a six-year old named Lucas, who was apprised of the band's existence by his father.Read More ...
Japan’s Annual Penis Festival – Celebrates Fertility
KOMAKI, Japan — It's springtime in Japan and that means one thing. Actually, two things. Penis festivals and vagina festivals. It may sound like a sophomoric gag. But these are folk rites going back at least 1,500 years, into Japan's agricultural past. They're held to ensure a good harvest and promote baby-making. Maybe they should hold more such festivals. Japan has one of the world's lowest birthrates (1.37 children per woman), which experts blame on stagnant incomes and changing gender relations.Read More ...
All world secret underground bases build for space travelers
The following material comes from people who know the Dulce (underground) base exists. They are people who worked in the labs; abductees taken to the base; people who assisted in the construction; intelligence personal (NSA,CIA,FBI ... ect.) and UFO / inner-earth researchers. This information is meant for those who are seriously interested in the dulce base. for your own protection be advised to “use caution” while investigating this complex.Does a strange world exist beneath our feet? Strange legends have persisted for centuries about the mysterious cavern world and the equally strange beings who inhabit it. More UFOlogists have considered the possibility that UFOs may be emanating from subterranean bases, that UFO aliens have constructed these bases to carry out various missions involving Earth or humans.Read More ...
The "Max Headroom pirating incident" is the fascinating story of the successful hijacking of two television signals in the Chicago, Illinois area on Sunday, November 22, 1987. This feat was accomplished by a mysterious person wearing a Max Headroom mask who somehow over-rode the station signals and then proceeded to perform an illegal broadcast on live television. The incident began when television broadcasts at two different stations (WTTW and WGN) were interrupted by the hijacker on the same day, only hours apart.Read More ...
German-Japanese flight to Moon and Mars in 1945-46
The moon has allways held a significant place for humanity both as a source for romantic inspiration for poets and the like to outstanding curiosity for scientists. Allthough, it is said to be a shadowy place some say of Aliens others say of Top Secret Moon Bases that are supposed to belong to The Third Reich what do you think ? It is said that in the early nineties that Nazies landed on the moon using some sort of giant flying saucer type object. These Nazi flying Saucers were said to stand about 45 mtrs high, had 10 stories of crew quaters and had a diameter of 60 mtrs. Well here is videos and texts that links that story ........Read More ...
These days, with all the pundits preaching doom and the impending collapse of society into some kind of Mad Max style wasteland, it's easy for us to imagine that the economy is as unhealthy as it's ever been. But any historian would give you a hard backhanded smack for even saying that out loud. History is full of economic idiocy, and here are five economic collapses that make 2010 feel like the Renaissance.Read More ...
Black-lip Rattail ............ These sorts of rattails feed in the muddy seafloor by gliding along head down and tail up, powered by gentle undulations of a long fin under the tail. The triangular head has sensory cells underneath that help detect animals buried in the mud or sand. The common name comes from the black edges around the mouth.Read More ...
What Came 'Before' the Big Bang? Leading Physicist Presents a Radical Theory
String theorists Neil Turok of Cambridge University and Paul Steinhardt, Albert Einstein Professor in Science and Director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton believe that the cosmos we live in was actually created by the cyclical trillion-year collision of two universes (which they define as three-dimensional branes plus time) that were attracted toward each other by the leaking of gravity out of one of the universes. In their view of the universe the complexities of an inflating universe after a Big Bang are replaced by a universe that was already large. flat, and uniform with dark energy as the effect of the other universe constantly leaking gravity into our own and driving its acceleration. According to this theory, the Big Bang was not the beginning of time but the bridge to a past filled with endlessly repeating cycles of evolution, each accompanied by the creation of new matter and the formation of new galaxies, stars, and planets.Read More ...
I work with a bunch of geeks. And that's okay. They do their thing and I do mine. Most of the time I'm happy for them, that they get joy and happiness out of playing with electronics. Admittedly I disagree with a lot of their thoughts about life. People used to believe that the Earth was the center of the universe, then it was the sun, but now we all know that the computer is the focal point of the universe, projecting its cathode ray goodness on our souls. You can't eat, sleep, breathe, live or run a business without one, or so we're told. But if there's one thing I have no tolerance for, it's the geek phenomenon known as slashdot.org, the sorriest case for content on the web I've ever seen pawned off and gleefully accepted by the masses.Read More ...
Learn How to Pronounce the Iceland Volcano Eyjafjallajokull and remember; When He Erupted In 1821, it lasted 2 years
The last time Eyjafjallajökull erupted, it lasted 2 years stretching from 1821-1823. It also erupted in 920 and 1612. Eyjafjallajökull's eruption usually precedes an eruption for another Icelandic volcano called Katla, as it did in 1823. Katla's eruptions are usually more violent than Eyjafjallajökul's. Due to the second activity on Eyjafjallajökull volcano since April 14, there are thousands of flights have been cancelled not only in Europe but also some flights from Asia, America and other continents. More over, it was also reportedly more than ten thousands of air travelers still stranded after a plume of ash cloud spreading across thousands of miles. No need to repeat the same news in every single post, actually there’s an interesting thing from the Iceland volcano’s name Eyjafjallajokull. Pronunciation is so difficult for some of us. Even, many people still don’t know what’s the right pronunciation of Eyjafjallajokull volcano. Did you know that?Read More ...
How drug companies deceive doctors and how hire ghostwriters to produce articles
Following doctor’s orders has become synonymous with danger. Every year, FDA approved drugs kill twice as many people as the total number of U.S. deaths from the Vietnam War. Death by medicine flourishes because deceit, not science, governs a doctor’s prescribing habits. This deceit comes in many forms. Medical ghostwriting and checkbook science are the most prominent.Read More ...
The Marijuana Conspiracy - The Real Reason Hemp isIllegal
MARIJUANAis DANGEROUS. Pot is NOT harmful to the human body or mind.Marijuana does NOT pose a threat to the general public. Marijuana isvery much a danger to the oil companies, alcohol, tobacco industriesand a large number of chemical corporations. Various big businesses,with plenty of dollars and influence, have suppressed the truth from thepeople. Thetruth is if marijuana was utilized for its vast array of commercialproducts, it would create an industrial atomic bomb! Entrepreneurs havenot been educated on the product potential of pot. The super rich haveconspired to spread misinformation about an extremely versatile plantthat, if used properly, would ruin their companies.Read More ...
9/11 has inspired a myriad of memorials who are scattered all across America. Some of them are of questionable taste, others contain strange occult symbolism while others simply piss people off. Here’s the five most offensive.Read More ...
A temple complex in Turkey that predates even the pyramids is rewriting the story of human evolution. They call it potbelly hill, after the soft, round contour of this final lookout in southeastern Turkey. To the north are forested mountains. East of the hill lies the biblical plain of Harran, and to the south is the Syrian border, visible 20 miles away, pointing toward the ancient lands of Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, the region that gave rise to human civilization. And under our feet, according to archeologist Klaus Schmidt, are the stones that mark the spot—the exact spot—where humans began that ascent.Read More ...
The international community has come out in force to condemn and declare war on the Somali fishermen pirates, while discreetly protecting the illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fleets from around the world that have been poaching and dumping toxic waste in Somali waters since the fall of the Somali government eighteen years ago. In 1991, when the government of Somalia collapsed, foreign interests seized the opportunity to begin looting the country’s food supply and using the country’s unguarded waters as a dumping ground for nuclear and other toxic waste.Read More ...
Hindu Nepalis celebrate the ‘great night of Shiva’ smoking hashish and marijuana
KATHMANDU: Narcotic Drugs (Control) Act forbids buying and selling of drugs in the country. The law can slap fines and an imprisonment of up to 20 years if convicted in drug related crimes. But a site at the Pashupatinath Temple area today made a mockery of the law. It was but smoke and mirrors. The holy site of Hindus smoked round-the-clock. The breeze smelled the cannabis as far away as Mitrapark and Gaushala. Some 50,000 Hindu pilgrims from Nepal and India gathered last Saturday (02/13/2010) in Kathmandu’s Pashaupatinath Temple to celebrate Mahashivaratri, the ‘great night of Shiva’. Worshippers, including teenagers, freely bought hashish and marijuana and immersed themselves in the polluted (and potentially infectious) waters of the Bagmati River.Read More ...
Squatting consists of occupying an abandoned or unoccupied space or building, usually residential, that the squatter does not own, rent or otherwise have permission to use. There are one billion squatters globally, that is, about one in every six people on the planet. Yet, according to Kesia Reeve, "squatting is largely absent from policy and academic debate and is rarely conceptualized, as a problem, as a symptom, or as a social or housing movement. In many countries, squatting is in itself a crime; in others, it is only seen as a civil conflict between the owner and the occupants. "Squatters are usually portrayed as worthless scroungers hell-bent on disrupting society." Property law and the state have traditionally favored the property owner. However, in many cases where squatters had de facto ownership, laws have been changed to legitimize their status.Read More ...
The World's First Commercial Brain-Computer Interface + history of BCI
A brain–computer interface (BCI), sometimes called a direct neural interface or a brain–machine interface, is a direct communication pathway between a brain and an external device. BCIs are often aimed at assisting, augmenting or repairing human cognitive or sensory-motor functions. Research on BCIs began in the 1970s at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) under a grant from the National Science Foundation, followed by a contract from DARPA. The papers published after this research also mark the first appearance of the expression brain–computer interface in scientific literature.Read More ...
The T2K Experiment - From Tokai To Kamioka - Where is the anti-matter?
From the beginning of 2010, the T2K experiment will fire a beam of muon-neutrinos from Tokai on Japan's east coast, 300km accross the country to a detector at Kamioka. It hopes to investigate the phenomenon of "neutrino oscillations" by looking for "muon neutrinos" oscillating into "electron neutrinos". A million pound detector has been built at the University of Warwick as part of a vital experiment to investigate fundamental particles - neutrinos.Read More ...
I STARTED collecting examples of bizarre experiments years ago while in graduate school studying the history of science. I confess I had no profound intellectual motive; I simply found them fascinating. They filled me with disbelief, astonishment, disgust and - best of all - laughter. With hindsight, perhaps there is a deeper message. These experiments are not the work of cranks.Read More ...
If you're trying to buy happiness, you'd be better off putting your money toward a tropical island get-away than a new computer, a new study suggests. The results show that people's satisfaction with their life-experience purchases — anything from seeing a movie to going on a vacation — tends to start out high and go up over time. On the other hand, although they might be initially happy with that shiny new iPhone or the latest in fashion, their satisfaction with these items wanes with time. The findings, based on eight separate studies, agree with previous research showing that experience-related buys lead to more happiness for the consumer. But the current work provides some insight into why.Read More ...
The giant ALICE detector is already underway at CERN, and researchers are scrambling to add an electromagnetic calorimeter to capture jet-quenching, the newest way to look inside the quark-gluon plasma — the hot, dense state of matter that filled the earliest universe, which the Large Hadron Collider will soon recreate by slamming lead nuclei into one another. CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is known mainly as the accelerator that will soon begin searching for the Higgs particle, and other new physics, in proton collisions at unprecedented energies — up to 14 TeV (14 trillion electron volts) at the center of mass — and with unprecedented beam intensities. But the same machine will also collide massive nuclei, specifically lead ions, to energies never achieved before in the laboratory.Read More ...
It is not science fiction. Researchers at The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla have designed a machine that thinks. Today, Darwin 6 consists of a realistically designed simulation of a nervous system housed in a mobile platform called NOMAD (Neurally Organized Mobile Adaptive Device). The research is conducted in the Institute's W.M. Keck Foundation Laboratory of Machine Psychology. Established in 1998 with a grant of 1.5 million from the W.M. Keck Foundation of Los Angeles, the Keck Laboratory studies the neural bases of behavior and how the brain reacts and adapts to a changing world. Its objective is to develop a new generation of powerful models of brain activity. Unlike a robot, NOMAD is an autonomous "being," used as a tool to study how the brain controls behavior. According to neuroscientist Jeffrey Krichmar, Ph.D., NOMAD is at the behavioral level of an infant.Read More ...
Earth's atmosphere came from outer space, find scientists
The gases which formed the Earth's atmosphere - and probably its oceans - did not come from inside the Earth but from outer space, according to a study by University of Manchester and University of Houston scientists. The report published this week in the prestigious international journal 'Science' means that textbook images of ancient Earth with huge volcanoes spewing gas into the atmosphere will have to be rethought.Read More ...
Seven theories of everything that pretend to describe the fundamental nature of the universe
We still don't have a theory that describes the fundamental nature of the universe, but there are plenty of candidates.
The "theory of everything" is one of the most cherished dreams of science. If it is ever discovered, it will describe the workings of the universe at the most fundamental level and thus encompass our entire understanding of nature. It would also answer such enduring puzzles as what dark matter is, the reason time flows in only one direction and how gravity works. Small wonder that Stephen Hawking famously said that such a theory would be "the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God". But theologians needn't lose too much sleep just yet. Despite decades of effort, progress has been slow. Rather than one or two rival theories whose merits can be judged against the evidence, there is a profusion of candidates and precious few clues as to which (if any) might turn out to be correct.Read More ...
It was nearly the end ofWWII. At thatsame time, scientist Viktor Schauberger worked on a secret project. Johannes Kepler, whose ideas Schauberger followed, had knowledge of the secretteachings of Pythagoras that had been adopted and kept secret. It wasthe knowledge of Implosion (in this case the utilization of the potential of the inner worlds in the outer world). Hitler knew - as did the Thule and Vril people - that the divine principle was always constructive. A technology however that is based on explosion and therefore is destructive runs against the divine principle. Thus they wanted to create a technology basedon Implosion.Read More ...
Mysterious Radio Waves from Unknown Object in M82 Galaxy
There is something strange is lurking in the galactic neighborhood. An unknown object in galaxy M82 12 million light-years away has started sending out radio waves, and the emission does not look like anything seen anywhere in the universe before except perhaps by Ford Prefect. M82 is starburst galaxy five times as bright as the Milky Way and one hundred times as bright as our galaxy's center. "We don't know what it is," says co-discoverer Tom Muxlow of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics near Macclesfield, UK. But its apparent sideways velocity is four times the speed of light. This "superluminal" motion occurs usually in high-speed jets of material bursting out by black holes.Read More ...
Black Prince, alien space probe, orbits Earth watching humans
Alexander Kazantsev, a Soviet author of sci-fi books, once said that a mysterious “unaccounted” satellite called Black Prince was spinning around Earth. The writer believed the object might be an alien probe, a messenger from extraterrestrial civilizations. Some people including scientists paid attention to the writer’s hypothesis.U.S. astrophysicist Ronald Bracewell was the first to take the hypothesis seriously. In 1960, he published a study to back his conclusions with data of practical radio engineering.Read More ...
Unsettled Mechanism of Supernova Detonation Gets a New Twist
Type Ia supernovae, often used to calibrate cosmological measurements, may arise from merging white dwarfs, after all
When stellar cataclysms known as type Ia supernovae flare up far across the universe, their brightness and consistency allow astronomers to use them as so-called standard candles to measure cosmological distances. Just over a decade ago, two teams used the supernovae to show that the universe is accelerating in its expansion due to the influence of dark energy, a shocking discovery that thrust type Ia supernovae into the astrophysical limelight. But how exactly did these cosmic mileposts come to be?Read More ...
NASA's WISE Mission Releases Medley of First Images
PASADENA, Calif. -- A diverse cast of cosmic characters is showcased in the first survey images NASA released Wednesday from its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. Since WISE began its scan of the entire sky in infrared light on Jan. 14, the space telescope has beamed back more than a quarter of a million raw, infrared images. Four new, processed pictures illustrate a sampling of the mission's targets -- a wispy comet, a bursting star-forming cloud, the grand Andromeda galaxy and a faraway cluster of hundreds of galaxies.Read More ...
Hubble telescope captures image of mysterious x-shaped object in space
Is that a smashed comet or an X-Wing fighter? Scientists are offering up their own theories as to what created the striking star-inspired image, which was captured by NASA's Hubble telescope in January. "Two small and previously unknown asteroids recently collided, creating a shower of debris that is being swept back into a tail from the collision site by the pressure of sunlight," said principal investigator David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles.Read More ...
Strange Images from Space - Photos&videos of the Bizarre in Our Universe
Some weird and unusual objects are floating around in the cosmos. Space is always serving up something new, unusual, and unexpected. Here are images and explanations of obejcts that have amazed and delighted astronomers.Read More ...
Follow Spirit*s Mars progress: ready to "taste" a rock named "Chocolate Hills"
Opportunity at a Sweet Spot on Mars
Guess who has a "sweet tooth?" The Opportunity rover on Mars, of course. The robotic geologist is poised and ready to "taste" a rock named "Chocolate Hills."This rock has a thick, dark-colored coating that is interesting to scientists because many of the rocks in the surrounding area have the same mysterious dark stuff. The coating could be remnants of a layer that was changed by the action of water and weather or, it could be a layer of rock that melted when a meteor (less than a foot across) impacted Mars,ejecting this rock and others and creating the crater "Concepcion".Read More ...
Homescience The World's First Commercial Brain-Computer Interface + history of BCI
The World's First Commercial Brain-Computer Interface + history of BCI
A brain–computer interface (BCI), sometimes called a direct neural interface or a brain–machine interface, is a direct communication pathway between a brain and an external device. BCIs are often aimed at assisting, augmenting or repairing human cognitive or sensory-motor functions. Research on BCIs began in the 1970s at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) under a grant from the National Science Foundation, followed by a contract from DARPA. The papers published after this research also mark the first appearance of the expression brain–computer interface in scientific literature.
The field of BCI has since blossomed spectacularly, mostly toward neuroprosthetics applications that aim at restoring damaged hearing, sight and movement. Thanks to the remarkable cortical plasticity of the brain, signals from implanted prostheses can, after adaptation, be handled by the brain like natural sensor or effector channels. Following years of animal experimentation, the first neuroprosthetic devices implanted in humans appeared in the mid-nineties.
Several laboratories have managed to record signals from monkey and rat cerebral cortices in order to operate BCIs to carry out movement. Monkeys have navigated computer cursors on screen and commanded robotic arms to perform simple tasks simply by thinking about the task and without any motor output. In May 2008 photographs that showed a monkey operating a robotic arm with its mind at the Pittsburgh University Medical Center were published in a number of well known science journals and magazines. Other research on cats has decoded visual signals. Dim lightsEmbed Embed this video on your site Experiments with monkeys in Neural Prosthetic Systems Laboratory at Stanford University.
Early work
The operant conditioning studies of Fetz and colleagues first demonstrated that monkeys could learn to control the deflection of a biofeedback meter arm with neural activity. Such work in the 1970s established that monkeys could quickly learn to voluntarily control the firing rates of individual and multiple neurons in the primary motor cortex if they were rewarded for generating appropriate patterns of neural activity. Studies that developed algorithms to reconstruct movements from motor cortex neurons, which control movement, date back to the 1970s. In the 1980s, Apostolos Georgopoulos at Johns Hopkins University found a mathematical relationship between the electrical responses of single motor-cortex neurons in rhesus macaque monkeys and the direction that monkeys moved their arms (based on a cosine function). He also found that dispersed groups of neurons in different areas of the brain collectively controlled motor commands but was only able to record the firings of neurons in one area at a time because of technical limitations imposed by his equipment.
There has been rapid development in BCIs since the mid-1990s. Several groups have been able to capture complex brain motor centre signals using recordings from neural ensembles (groups of neurons) and use these to control external devices, including research groups led by Richard Andersen, John Donoghue, Phillip Kennedy, Miguel Nicolelis, and Andrew Schwartz.
Dim lightsEmbed Embed this video on your site April 9, 2008 lecture by Randy Breen for the Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium (EE380). The Emotiv EPOC (www.emotiv.com) now makes it possible for games to be controlled and influenced by the player's mind. Engaging, immersive, and nuanced, Emotiv-inspired game-play will be like nothing ever seen before. Based on the latest developments in neuro-technology, Emotiv has developed a new personal interface for human computer interaction. EE380 | Computer Systems Colloquium: http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/
New research from the University of Southampton has demonstrated that it is possible for communication from person to person through the power of thought -- with the help of electrodes, a computer and Internet connection.
Brain-Computer Interfacing (BCI) can be used for capturing brain signals and translating them into commands that allow humans to control (just by thinking) devices such as computers, robots, rehabilitation technology and virtual reality environments.
This experiment goes a step further and was conducted by Dr Christopher James from the University's Institute of Sound and Vibration Research. The aim was to expand the current limits of this technology and show that brain-to-brain (B2B) communication is possible.
Dim lightsEmbed Embed this video on your site Live demonstration of a brain-controlled Adams Family pinball machine by imagined movements at the CeBit IT fair 2010 in Hannover. While the player imagines left and right hand movements, algorithms decode his brain activity signals in realtime into control signals for the pinball machine. The demonstration shows the cutting edge performance of a brain-computer interface system with regard of timing precision of the control signal. Other (slower) applications are developed for communication needs of e.g. paralized patients. Involved partners of this project: Technische Universität Berlin (Machine Learning Lab); Charité University Hospital Berlin, Dept. Neurology. Pinball machine was kindly sponsored by BrainProducts GmbH.
Dim lightsEmbed Embed this video on your site A brain-computer interface based on EEG signals, developed by MMSPG. It allows to type a text without using one's fingers
Dr James comments: "Whilst BCI is no longer a new thing and person to person communication via the nervous system was shown previously in work by Professor Kevin Warwick from the University of Reading, here we show, for the first time, true brain to brain interfacing. We have yet to grasp the full implications of this but there are various scenarios where B2B could be of benefit such as helping people with severe debilitating muscle wasting diseases, or with the so-called 'locked-in' syndrome, to communicate and it also has applications for gaming."
His experiment had one person using BCI to transmit thoughts, translated as a series of binary digits, over the internet to another person whose computer receives the digits and transmits them to the second user's brain through flashing an LED lamp.
Dim lightsEmbed Embed this video on your site Two persons playing PONG. No mouse, no joystick just thought. Amazing. PLEASE* - you can link the video, embedd it on your blog - no problem. *BUT* do mention me as the author and put a link to my weblog at http://www.andreas.de/wordpress
While attached to an EEG amplifier, the first person would generate and transmit a series of binary digits, imagining moving their left arm for zero and their right arm for one. The second person was also attached to an EEG amplifier and their PC would pick up the stream of binary digits and flash an LED lamp at two different frequencies, one for zero and the other one for one. The pattern of the flashing LEDs is too subtle to be picked by the second person, but it is picked up by electrodes measuring the visual cortex of the recipient.
The encoded information is then extracted from the brain activity of the second user and the PC can decipher whether a zero or a one was transmitted. This shows true brain-to-brain activity.
You can watch Dr James' BCI experiment at: Dim lightsEmbed Embed this video on your site Dr James is part of the University of Southampton's Brain-Computer Interfacing Research Programme, which brings together biomedical engineering and the clinical sciences and provides a cohesive scientific basis for rehabilitation research and management. Projects are driven by clinical problems, using cutting-edge signal processing research to produce an investigative tool for advancing knowledge of neurophysiological mechanisms, as well as providing a practical therapeutic system to be used outside a specialised BCI laboratory.
Dr James also appeared on BBC2's 'James May's Big Ideas' last year, talking about thought controlled wheelchairs and introducing the field of BCI. You can view the segment here: Dim lightsEmbed Embed this video on your site
How Brain-computer Interfaces Work
As the power of modern computers grows alongside our understanding of the human brain, we move ever closer to making some pretty spectacular science fiction into reality. Imagine transmitting signals directly to someone's brain that would allow them to see, hear or feel specific sensory inputs. Consider the potential to manipulate computers or machinery with nothing more than a thought. It isn't about convenience -- for severely disabled people, development of a brain-computer interface (BCI) could be the most important technological breakthrough in decades. In this article, we'll learn all about how BCIs work, their limitations and where they could be headed in the future.
The Electric Brain
The reason a BCI works at all is because of the way our brains function. Our brains are filled with neurons, individual nerve cells connected to one another by dendrites and axons. Every time we think, move, feel or remember something, our neurons are at work. That work is carried out by small electric signals that zip from neuron to neuron as fast as 250 mph [source: Walker]. The signals are generated by differences in electric potential carried by ions on the membrane of each neuron. Although the paths the signals take are insulated by something called myelin, some of the electric signal escapes. Scientists can detect those signals, interpret what they mean and use them to direct a device of some kind. It can also work the other way around. For example, researchers could figure out what signals are sent to the brain by the optic nerve when someone sees the color red. They could rig a camera that would send those exact signals into someone's brain whenever the camera saw red, allowing a blind person to "see" without eyes.
Although we already understand the basic principles behind BCIs, they don't work perfectly. There are several reasons for this.
1. The brain is incredibly complex. To say that all thoughts or actions are the result of simple electric signals in the brain is a gross understatement. There are about 100 billion neurons in a human brain [source: Greenfield]. Each neuron is constantly sending and receiving signals through a complex web of connections. There are chemical processes involved as well, which EEGs can't pick up on. 2. The signal is weak and prone to interference. EEGs measure tiny voltage potentials. Something as simple as the blinking eyelids of the subject can generate much stronger signals. Refinements in EEGs and implants will probably overcome this problem to some extent in the future, but for now, reading brain signals is like listening to a bad phone connection. There's lots of static. 3. The equipment is less than portable. It's far better than it used to be -- early systems were hardwired to massive mainframe computers. But some BCIs still require a wired connection to the equipment, and those that are wireless require the subject to carry a computer that can weigh around 10 pounds. Like all technology, this will surely become lighter and more wireless in the future.
A few companies are pioneers in the field of BCI. Most of them are still in the research stages, though a few products are offered commercially.
Neural Signals is developing technology to restore speech to disabled people. An implant in an area of the brain associated with speech (Broca's area) would transmit signals to a computer and then to a speaker. With training, the subject could learn to think each of the 39 phonemes in the English language and reconstruct speech through the computer and speaker [source: Neural Signals]. NASA has researched a similar system, although it reads electric signals from the nerves in the mouth and throat area, rather than directly from the brain. They succeeded in performing a Web search by mentally "typing" the term "NASA" into Google [source: New Scientist]. Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems is marketing the BrainGate, a neural interface system that allows disabled people to control a wheelchair, robotic prosthesis or computer cursor [source: Cyberkinetics]. Japanese researchers have developed a preliminary BCI that allows the user to control their avatar in the online world Second Life [source: Ars Technica].
Dim lightsEmbed Embed this video on your site This is a headset with brain computer interface. It's exterior looks is designed by Tommi P. Laiho and functions by Sami Leino and Tommi P. Laiho.
