Scientists have long known that the young and old brains are very different.
A single molecular switch, that when flipped, helps create the mature neuronal connections that allow the brain to bridge the gap between adolescent impressionability and adult stability.
Continue reading… “Flipping a single molecular switch can make an old brain young”
An international team of scientists in Europe has created a silicon chip designed to function like a human brain. With 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections, the chip is able to mimic the brain’s ability to learn more closely than any other machine.
Continue reading… “Silicon Chip Designed To Function Like A Human Brain”
How would you build a conscious machine? Well to begin with I’d get Life Insurance and then take my brain and put it in a jar and freeze my body. Then hundreds of years later wake me up and transplant me into an IronMan. Yes, I partially got that idea from the movie IronMan and from Futurama. I’m still going to do it though. But more to the point, Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi both have good points of in their articles that they wrote on consciousness and robots.
Continue reading… “Can Robots Evolve? On Building the “Conscious” Machine…”
A new strain of genetically engineered mice has allowed researchers to pinpoint, for the first time, the precise cellular connections that form as a memory is created. By tracing a protein tagged to glow fluorescent green as it migrates through individual neurons, from the cell body out through the branching dendrites, the researchers could see exactly which synapses–connections to other neurons–were involved when the mice learned to fear an electric shock.
Continue reading… “A Glowing Protein Shows How We Make Memories”
