From The Gadget Lab

19 Patents Invented by Ingenious Celebrities

Scary but coming from Microsoft

[...] The new Connected Car will know its riders, and will interact with them naturally via speech, gestures, and face tracking. It will learn their habits, and offer personalized contextual information and driving assists to get them to their destination as quickly and safely as possible. Through a growing catalogue of applications, it will inform and entertain them, and keep them connected with the people and information they care about. The possibilities are endless.

Next step, Newt Gingrich

By John Roach 

After six years and several million dollars, scientists have created a 3-D model of a rat brain circuit.

The accomplishment is a first step toward creating a complete computer model of the brain that will allow a deeper understanding of how our noggins work — and what causes them to malfunction, according to the scientists behind the feat. 

For a starting point, researchers at the Max Planck Florida Institute are focused on how the rat brain processes information gathered by a single whisker. 

They did so because studies in their lab and elsewhere have shown that a single whisker is able to detect, in complete darkness, whether a gap is safe to jump over and, if so, trigger the order to jump. 

What's more, there's a specific region of the brain "that is dedicated to processing information from a dedicated whisker," Marcel Oberlaender, a researcher at the institute and the first author of a paper explaining the research in the journal Cerebral Cortex, told me today.

That region is called the cortical column, a vertically-organized series of connected neurons that form a brain circuit and an elementary building block of the cortex. 

The cortex is the part of the brain responsible for many of the higher functions, such as memory and consciousness.

To build the model, the researchers studied the cortical column in awake and anesthetized rats as well as brain slices and then used computer software and other tools to reconstruct it.

"The model we built is really based on a complete reconstruction of these nerve cells," Oberlaender said. "So how the model looks in the end resembles how it would look in the real animal."

It is composed of 16,000 neurons, each of which can be divided into one of nine different cell types that has characteristic functional, structural and connectivity properties, he added.

The model can now be used to run computer simulations that show, in realistic detail, how signals flow within the brain. So, they can begin to understand, for example, what neurons fire as the rat detects the gap and decides whether or not to jump.

Until now, researchers have only been able to see how a single neuron or a small group of neurons interact during such a process. "We can now, in simulation experiments, mimic what is really going on in these circuits," Oberlaender said.

Going forward, the researchers should be able to use the methodology developed to build this model to add more parts to it, thus incorporating other brain functions such as the motor system that sends a signal down the spinal cord and makes the limbs move so that rat can jump over the gap.

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website.

A bit of history > eBook Tops All Trade Publishing Categories in February

By Jason Boog on April 14, 2011 3:47 PM

eBooks hit a major milestone in February. According to Association of American Publishers (AAP) sales figures, eBooks ranked as the top format “among all categories of trade publishing” that month.

 

eBook sales totaled $90.3 million for the month, expanding 202 percent compared to the same period  last year. Below, we’ve embedded the full release.

Here’s more from the AAP: “This one-month surge is primarily attributed to a high level of strong post-holiday e-Book buying, or ‘loading,’ by consumers who received e-Reader devices as gifts.  Experts note that the expanded selection of e-Readers introduced for the holidays and the broader availability of titles are factors.”

Discovery News > Resort attracts men with virtual girlfriends

Sad, sick, weird, funny or what? I dunno.

A resort in Japan is offering young men a tourism destination to frolic with their virtual girlfriends. The resort is based on a game called "Love Plus," which encourages players to develop long-term relationships with virtual women. Read the rest of this story here.

The monster known as "Earl"

Wired > Gadget Lab > Robotic Eye

The eye has a transparent-plastic inner sphere with a set of magnets around it, painted to look just like a human eye. It is suspended in fluid and has a transparent outer shell. Using electromagnets from the outside, the eye is moved sideways or up and down, giving it a smooth and easy motion. “It is as fast as the human eye and as good as the human eye." The pupil and the back of the eye are clear. A camera placed at the rear of the eye helps the eye see. Read more here