How researchers are predicting specific thoughts from brain activity
Revealing the brain’s hidden stash of pictures, thoughts, and plans has, until recently, been the work of parlor magicians. Yet within the last decade, neuroscientists have gained powerful...
Jan, 02, 2012
For a century, neuroscientists have dissected, traced, eavesdropped on, and are now compiling a seemingly endless cast of players in the nervous system. As we keep gathering more and more molecular...
Apr, 01, 2009
RunBot, already the world’s fastest bipedal robot, has now also learned to keep its balance when walking up ramps. “We have achieved a synthesis of different functionalities, between...
Oct, 01, 2007
A virtual lab rat; simulated DNA; an artificial pancreas; & integrating mental health data
Several biomedical computing projects received multi-million dollar funding in the fall of 2011, including efforts to: simulate the cardiac physiology of the rat; build a state-of-the-art DNA...
Jan, 02, 2012
Balancing Breadth and Depth
The last decade saw a proliferation of training programs at the intersection of life science and computation, with more than 60 new degree and certificate programs launched in the United States alone...
Sep, 01, 2005
An elegant new model of balance control suggests the brain only cares about one thing: the body’s center of mass.
Bumped from behind, a person may step forward to avoid falling. Perhaps her arms fly out as well. To the untrained eye, these movements seem like the result of the brain controlling individual nerve...
Jan, 01, 2008
As barriers to massive imaging collections fall, researchers can look at human systems in their entirety rather than in pieces
In the beginning there was the Visible Human. It broke new ground by gathering some 2,000 serial images from a death row inmate’s cadaver, and was the first time researchers had sectioned a...
Jul, 01, 2007
Public databases impact not only how research is done but what kind of research is done in the first place.
The setting: a scientific conference in January 2008. The speaker, Bruce Ponder, MD, PhD, an oncology professor at Cambridge University, is describing a previously unknown link between a particular...
Oct, 01, 2008
The National Institutes of Health are on a mission: To understand and tackle the problems of human health. To make that daunting problem approachable, 15 of the 20 institutes divvy up human health...
Oct, 05, 2012
Brain implants are giving hope to the disabled and revolutionizing neuroscience
Matthew Nagle can move a cursor on a computer screen with only the power of his thoughts. It’s a remarkable feat for anyone, but especially momentous for Nagle, who is paralyzed from the neck...
Aug, 31, 2005
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