Filed under: Neuroscience
A collaboration between the DiCarlo Lab and the Center for Biological & Computational Learning has closed on the real-time decoding of primate vision. (more…)
Filed under: Synthetic Biology
In an article about an MIT competition to design and construct bizarre biological mechanisms the purpose of the event was described:
“The key idea here is to develop a library of composable parts which we think of in the same way as Lego blocks,” says Tom Knight, an engineer at MIT who cofounded the competition with MIT bioengineer Drew Endy. (Both advise the MIT team.) “These parts can be assembled into more-complex pieces, which in many cases are functional when inserted into living cells.”[source]
One of the most important goals of the competition is to stock the shelves of the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, a sort of hardware store of genetic parts housed at MIT. “The idea is to standardize parts and the way they are put together, in the same way electrical and mechanical parts are standardized,” says Knight. “And to be able to give people a reasonable assurance that the parts, when put together, will function as they were designed to.”[source]
I, for one, will be a regular visitor to the Registry.
The Foresight Nanotech Institute have published glowing praise for the aspirations of PuramatrixTM founder, Prof. Shuguang Zhang. They approvingly quote Zhang from an eJournal article:
For example, aging and damaged tissues can be replaced with the scaffolds that stimulate cells to repair body parts or to rejuvenate the skin. We also might be able to swim and dive like dolphins or to climb mountains with a nanoscaffold lung device that can carry an extra supply of oxygen. It is not impossible to anticipate painting cars and houses with photosynthesis molecular machines that can harness the unlimited solar energy for all populations on every corner of the planet, not just for the wealthy few…[source]
The Puramatrix company website has an impressive publications list. The company is basing its business on nano-scaffolding techniques that can be used to facilitate the construction of any number of other structures and mechanisms.
Another old piece of research. Cat vision being decoded at Berkeley by Yang Dan, Garrett B. Stanley and Fei Fei Li:
The original research was reported in:
Garrett B. Stanley, Fei F. Li, and Yang Dan
Reconstruction of Natural Scenes from Ensemble Responses in the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus
J. Neurosci., Sep 1999; 19: 8036 – 8042
The abstract, links to full text and citations can be found at The Journal of Neuroscience.
Filed under: Robotics
Science is reporting the development of a walking robot capable of reassessing its own physiology and adjusting its gait in response to damage (see also ScienceDaily, Scientific American and Physorg).
The research has been done at Cornell university by Hod Lipson and Victor Zykov.
Zykov was involved in an earlier demonstration of self-assembling and self-repairing robots called, MolecubesTM.
There is a video of the MolecubesTM in action on Zykov’s homepage.
The Guardian today reported that, not only was it a relatively straightforward matter to extract the information from the RFID chips in new UK passports, but that the data could potentially be read from up to 1m away. To date dutch researchers have already read the data from a distance of 30cm.
An individual’s security will be lower as a result of adopting the new passports. The techniques used to steal data or clone identities will now happen imperceptibly.
I first came across the link to this photo on boing boing which was linking to an article in we-make-money-not-art. 
By photogropher Geert Goiris
