NEWRON vol I issue IX (4-13-07)

Edited by: Natan Davidovics

Mixed Feelings

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.04/esp.html

See with your tongue. Navigate with your skin. Fly by the seat of your pants (literally). How researchers can tap the plasticity of the brain to hack our 5 senses — and build a few new ones.

In Our Messy, Reptilian Brains

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17888475/site/newsweek/

The brain is a "cobbled-together mess." Impressive in function, sure. But in its design the brain is "quirky, inefficient and bizarre ... a weird agglomeration of ad hoc solutions that have accumulated throughout millions of years of evolutionary history,"

*Hopkins professor of neuroscience, David Linden is quoted in this article

Easy on the eyes

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8954632

Thomas Serre and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have built a computer processing system that tries to work in this general way. Among the tasks that computers are bad at is recognising broad categories of images. Tell one to search for something specific, such as a rectangle or even a human face, and it can make a reasonable fist of the task. Ask it to find "animals" among photographs of dragonflies, trees, sharks, cars and monkeys, and it falls over.

Flexible electronics could find applications as sensors, artificial muscles

http://www.anl.gov/Media_Center/News/2007/news070402.html

Flexible electronic structures with the potential to bend, expand and manipulate electronic devices are being developed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. These flexible structures could find useful applications as sensors and as electronic devices that can be integrated into artificial muscles or biological tissues.