Honda Connects Brain Thoughts With Robotics

From APNews/Myway:

TOKYO (AP) - Opening a car trunk or controlling a home air conditioner could become just a wish away with Honda's new technology that connects thoughts inside a brain with robotics.

Honda Motor Co. (HMC) has developed a way to read patterns of electric currents on a person's scalp as well as changes in cerebral blood flow when a person thinks about four simple movements - moving the right hand, moving the left hand, running and eating.

Honda succeeded in analyzing such thought patterns, and then relaying them as wireless commands for Asimo, its human-shaped robot.

In a video shown Tuesday at Tokyo headquarters, a person wearing a helmet sat still but thought about moving his right hand - a thought that was picked up by cords attached to his head inside the helmet. After several seconds, Asimo, programmed to respond to brain signals, lifted its right arm.

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Nanotechnology May Have Found Its Henry Ford

Picture: Nano designer: Professor Nadrian Seeman has created two-armed worker robots made of DNA. Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monito

From Christian Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 27, 2009) — This month Fox Chase Cancer Center performed the world's first successful minimally invasive distal pancreatectomy using the ViKY® system's revolutionary robotic, compact laparoscope holder. The technology, developed in France and tested on thousands of patients in Europe, made its debut in a cancer setting in the United States at Fox Chase.

"Fox Chase is among only a handful of institutions worldwide using robotics or laparoscopy to treat patients with nearly all types of cancer," says Robert G. Uzzo, MD, FACS, chairman of the department of surgery at Fox Chase. "The use of technology, like the ViKY system, reinforces our Center's commitment to excellence in minimally invasive surgical techniques for the care of patients with both benign and cancerous conditions."

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World’s First Successful ViKY Robot-assisted Surgery For Pancreatic Tumors

Photo: "The new ViKY robotic laparoscope holder acts as an extra hand during surgery, giving me stability and steadiness," said Dr. Gumbs. (Credit: Image courtesy of Fox Chase Cancer Center)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 27, 2009) — This month Fox Chase Cancer Center performed the world's first successful minimally invasive distal pancreatectomy using the ViKY® system's revolutionary robotic, compact laparoscope holder. The technology, developed in France and tested on thousands of patients in Europe, made its debut in a cancer setting in the United States at Fox Chase.

"Fox Chase is among only a handful of institutions worldwide using robotics or laparoscopy to treat patients with nearly all types of cancer," says Robert G. Uzzo, MD, FACS, chairman of the department of surgery at Fox Chase. "The use of technology, like the ViKY system, reinforces our Center's commitment to excellence in minimally invasive surgical techniques for the care of patients with both benign and cancerous conditions."

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Robot Madness: Walk Like Humans Do

A member of the Dutch RoboCup team, which is to participate in the 2008 RoboCup Soccer competition in China this summer. Credit: TU Delft

From Live Science:

Robots are stepping out everywhere these days, from fashion show catwalks to the rugged mountains of Afghanistan. But not all of them walk the same way, or with the same purpose.

A Japanese humanoid robot made its debut this week at a fashion show, although news reports noted that its smooth walk still didn't measure up to the stride of a human supermodel. HRP-4C represents just the latest robot attempting to achieve bipedal walking, which remains a distinctly human feature in comparison to most animals.

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Robot Madness: Will Cyborgs Compromise Privacy?

SixthSense is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world with digital information and lets people use natural hand gestures to interact with that information. Here Sixth Sense projects web video onto a prototype newspaper. Credit: MIT Media Lab

From Live Science:

In Robot Madness, LiveScience examines humanoid robots and cybernetic enhancement of humans, as well as the exciting and sometimes frightening convergence of it all. Return for a new episode each Monday, Wednesday and Friday through April 6.

People who talk with one-eyed filmmaker Robert Spence may find it creepy to realize they're staring into a bionic eye camera – and that's the entire point of the "EyeBorg" project.

Spence wants to raise awareness of concerns in an increasingly networked society, by using a wireless video camera disguised as a natural eye to create a documentary. The purpose, he says, is to highlight privacy issues raised by technologies which have become hidden in modern life.

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MIT Researchers Develop Graphene-based Microchip That Can Operate At 1,000GHz

From Soft Sailer:

Researchers at MIT have developed a graphene-based microchip that can operate at 1,000GHz, a much higher speed that conventional silicon chips would ever dream of reaching. These ultra-fast microchips can improve the data transfer rate for cellphones, computers, or other electronic devices. When it was discovered in 2004, graphene was regarded as a material that could lead to many new applications and it seems like this form of pure carbon can contribute to manufacturing transistors and prototype devices.

The research was led by Tomás Palacios, assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, EECS assistant professor Jing Kong, and two of their students, Han Wang and Daniel Nezich. The MIT team of researchers developed a graphene chip that was supposed to act as a frequency multiplier which can input an electrical signal of a specified frequency and output an electrical signal with a multiplied frequency.

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Brain On A Chip?

(Image from The Speculist)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 23, 2009) — How does the human brain run itself without any software? Find that out, say European researchers, and a whole new field of neural computing will open up. A prototype ‘brain on a chip’ is already working.

“We know that the brain has amazing computational capabilities,” remarks Karlheinz Meier, a physicist at Heidelberg University. “Clearly there is something to learn from biology. I believe that the systems we are going to develop could form part of a new revolution in information technology.”

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