Discovering neurotechnology breakthroughs

Relatively Quarky: Gun show: the prosthetics breakthrough

At a liberal arts college with a long history of fostering leaders in medicine, it is important that we learn to adapt to the drastically different future of the field. This future is going to rely heavily on the integration of biotechnology.
One of the holy grails of modern biotechnological research is making artificial prosthetics indistinguishable from real limbs. After preliminary tests of a study that was published Wednesday in “Science Translational Medicine,” researchers at two European universities are coming closer than ever to achieving this incredible dream.
Almost a decade ago, Dennis Aabo Sørensen had to have his left arm amputated after a New Year’s Eve firework accident. Sørensen, who lives in Denmark, decided to participate in a trial being conducted by researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Italy.

Relatively Quarky: Proof of the big bang is mind-blowing

Over Spring Break, physicists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics made an announcement that has been reverberating throughout the scientific community ever since. The discovery came from a small telescope known as BICEP2 located less than a mile from the geographic South Pole. From this location, scientists were able to glimpse much more than space through the telescope; they were able to see ripples formed at the very beginning of the universe.
Albert Einstein first theorized the existence of these ripples, known as gravitational waves, in his 1916 general theory of relativity. On March 17, however, it was announced that direct images of gravitational waves were detected for the first time.
Einstein’s general theory of relativity is currently our best model for gravity. It beautifully unites the dimensions of space and time, describing it as a fabric known as space-time that permeates throughout the cosmos.
General relativity describes the gravitational force as a curvature of space-time.
The more massive an object, the more the object warps the space-time surrounding it. Think of what happens to the fabric of a trampoline when someone stands in the middle. If you were to roll billiard balls around that person, they would ride along this curvature and begin to orbit like planets around a star.
Einstein’s equations of general relativity predict that large accelerations of mass in space-time create gravitational waves, not unlike the waves traveling through a bed sheet when you make your bed. For the most part, these waves are so absurdly small that they are nearly impossible to measure.
In the first fractions of a second after the big bang, however, the theory maintains that the universe accelerated so rapidly that the ripples that were sent through space-time then are still detectable now.
The effects of these primordial ripples are exactly what the BICEP2 telescope detected.This period of incredible expansion at the beginning of the universe is known as inflation, and the gravitational waves detected from the early universe are the most compelling evidence of inflation theory to date.
I had the opportunity to talk with Bowdoin professor Thomas Baumgarte, of the physics and astronomy department, about the recent discovery. Baumgarte specializes in a field known as numerical relativity, where he uses computers to solve Einstein’s equations and to model astrophysical systems.
On the significance of the discovery Baumgarte said, “It’s the first time that the imprint of gravitational waves is measured in the cosmic microwave background and it’s also the firmest confirmation of the phase known as inflation.”
He went on to say, “It’s amazing that [we] can actually detect the effect of gravitational radiation from the first tiniest fractions of seconds of the beginning of the universe.”
Baumgarte is very familiar with gravitational waves due to the nature of his numerical relativity models. He has focused on modeling what the gravitational radiation would look like if two black holes or two massive stars known as neutron stars orbited each other in a binary system.
As for the reward for this incredible insight into the early inflationary universe, Baumgarte agreed that the Nobel committee will have quite a headache picking three out of the dozens of ingenious scientists behind this extraordinary discovery.

Relatively Quarky

Discovering neurotechnology breakthroughs

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

David Miller

Columnist

February 21, 2014

The word telepathy comes from the ancient Greek “tele,” meaning distant, and “pathos,” meaning feeling. It has been the subject of countless science fiction stories over the past half-century. Just in the past few years, however, scientists at Harvard Medical School have been making incredible breakthroughs that may place telepathy in the realm of science fact rather than that of science fiction.

Last year, a team led by Harvard scientist Seung-Schik Yoo released a study published in PLOS ONE journal, unveiling a successful, non-invasive brain-to-brain interface that allows human test subjects to mentally stimulate a rat to move its tail.

No, this is not some pseudoscience study to rile up the nervous pessimists who think we’re heading toward a dystopian demise. This is a watershed moment in the development of neurotechnologies that may lead to profound applications in medicine, such as helping paralysis victims relearn how to use previously paralyzed limbs.

The researchers anaesthetized a rat and utilized transcranial focused ultrasound (FUS), a device that can noninvasively stimulate brain regions using ultrasound to target the rat’s motor cortex. The human test subjects were fitted with EEG equipment that records the electrical activity of certain brain regions to measure and transmits the signals to a computer interface.

The computer targeted a specific type of activity—the intent to move the rat’s tail—and transmitted it to the EEG and the FUS to stimulate the rat’s motor cortex.

The Brain to Brain interface achieved 94 percent accuracy and a time delay of only 1.6 seconds from when the human test subject initiated the thought to when the rat moved its tail.

The researchers even released a video that records the telepathic connection in real time. Who knew the first telepathic connection would be an interspecies one?

Telepathic studies hardly end here. Just this past week, a different group of researchers at Harvard Medical School released a study in “Nature Communications” that is eerily reminiscent of a certain James Cameron film starring large, blue creatures and even uses the word “avatar” to refer to its test subjects. For the first time, they developed a brain to spinal cord interface using electrode implants.

The researchers used a conscious monkey, referred to as “the master,” and an anaesthetized one, referred to as “the avatar.” The conscious monkey had an implanted brain chip that recorded the activity of up to 100 neurons. This activity was transmitted directly to a series of 36 electrodes located in the avatar monkey’s spinal cord.

The master watched a cursor on a screen in which the avatar’s hand could control using a joystick and in 98 percent of the trials, the master correctly controlled the avatar’s hand.

The implications of this study are astounding, and the researchers hope to one day use this technology to allow brain signals to bypass damaged nerve cells in patients with spinal cord damage.

Although both of the studies garnered a lot of criticism regarding how far the researchers must go to achieve in a clinical setting, they are breathtaking developments in a new area of science long thought to be an unfeasible subject reserved for Hollywood movies.

For everyone reading this and thinking that they will soon have their own avatar that can run around Pandora jumping from tree to tree or doing the six hours of reading for tomorrow’s class while you relax on the couch—stop fantasizing. While the dream of telepathic avatars that can help you become a science fiction hero will probably never come to fruition, the future for paralysis victims has never looked brighter.

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