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Why newborn babies can’t walk
Posted by wideant in Neuroscience on December 21, 2009
A new study by scientists in Sweden has shed light on the mystery, finding that the time it takes for all mammals to start walking closely correlates with the size of their adult brains. The researchers from Lund University found that motor development milestones in rats and ferrets, such as crawling and walking, followed the same timetable but at different rates, being faster for rats. The team then wondered if similar results would be found for other mammals. Then they used a multiple-regression model to study the time between conception and walking for 24 mammal species, including sheep, chimpanzees, guinea pigs, camels, and aardvarks.
They found that mammals with larger brains, such as humans, take longer to master walking than species with smaller brains and those that walk on the heels (like humans) take the longest time to learn to walk, which the scientists thought might also be related to the brain since this kind of walking is more complex and probably takes more brain power. Read the rest of this entry »
Researchers show brain waves can ‘write’ on a computer in early tests
Brain waves can be used to type alphanumerical characters on a computer screen. This has been demonstrated by Neuroscientists at the Mayo Clinic campus in Jacksonville, Fla and presented at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Epilepsy Society.
In this study, the two patients with epilepsy were already being monitored for seizure activity using electrocorticography (ECoG), in which electrodes are placed directly on the surface of the brain to record electrical activity produced by the firing of nerve cells, sat in front of a monitor that was hooked to a computer running the researchers’ software, which was designed to interpret electrical signals coming from the electrodes. The patients were asked to look at the screen, which contained a 6-by-6 matrix with a single alphanumeric character inside each square. Read the rest of this entry »
Rethinking artificial intelligence: Researchers hope to produce ‘co-processors’ for the human mind
Posted by wideant in Computer Sciences on December 16, 2009
It is widely accepted that AI has failed to realize many of those lofty early promises. artificial-intelligence research (AI) have spent much of time wandering in the wilderness, swapping hugely ambitious goals for a relatively modest set of actual accomplishments. Now, The new project, launched with an initial $5 million grant and a five-year timetable, is called the Mind Machine Project, or MMP are gearing up for a massive ‘do-over’ of the whole idea. One of the project’s goals is to create intelligent machines — “whatever that means.” MMP group members span five generations of artificial-intelligence research, some of the pioneers of the field, joined by later generations of thinkers. Read the rest of this entry »