Robots which can gain power from eating small animals!

Gallery: Domestic robots with a taste for flesh

6.25.09 / Jessica Griggs / New Scientist

Futuristic-looking robots like Honda’s sleek humanoid Asimo don’t cut it for designer James Auger, at the Royal College of Art, London. Believing that they need to fit unobtrusively into the home, he has built robotic furniture. And, believing they need to be useful and entertaining, he has given the furniture an appetite for vermin, like mice and flies.

See a gallery of images of the carnivorous robotic furniture

Auger worked with long time collaborator and fellow designer Jimmy Loizeau to build the five domestic robots. Each can sense its environment, has mechanical moving parts, and can perform basic services for its human hosts, such as telling the time or lighting a room.

‘Game of life’

But the robots also have a taste for flesh. They can gain energy by chomping on flies and mice, an idea inspired by researchers at Bristol Robotics Lab, UK, who built a fly-powered robot and have also suggested that marine robots could feed on plankton.

The pests are lured in and digested by an internal microbial fuel cell. This exploits the way microbes generate free electrons and hydrogen ions when oxidising chemicals for energy. Electronics can be powered by directing the electrons around an external circuit before reuniting them with the ions.

“As soon as there is a predatory robot in the room the scene becomes loaded with potential,” Auger told New Scientist. “A fly buzzing around the window suddenly becomes an actor in a live game of life, as the viewer half wills it towards the robot and half hopes for it to escape.”

Although, for now, the robots rely on mains power, Auger believes they could become truly self-sufficient. “If the system fails, the grid goes down and all humans die, these robots could go on living so long as the flies don’t go with us.”

Doctors stunned by 16 year old girl who looks like a toddler and does not age

Doctors Baffled, Intrigued by Girl Who Doesn’t Age

Years Pass, but Brooke Greenberg Remains a Toddler. No One Can Explain How or Why.

6.23.09 / Bob Brown / ABC News

Brooke Greenberg is the size of an infant, with the mental capacity of a toddler.

She turned 16 in January.

“Why doesn’t she age?” Howard Greenberg, 52, asked of his daughter. “Is she the fountain of youth?”

Such questions are why scientists are fascinated by Brooke. Among the many documented instances of children who fail to grow or develop in some way, Brooke’s case may be unique, according to her doctor, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine pediatrician Lawrence Pakula, in Baltimore.

“Many of the best-known names in medicine, in their experience … had not seen anyone who matched up to Brooke,” Pakula said. “She is always a surprise.”

Watch “20/20″ FRIDAY at 10 p.m. ET for Brooke’s story.

Brooke hasn’t aged in the conventional sense. Dr. Richard Walker of the University of South Florida College of Medicine, in Tampa, says Brooke’s body is not developing as a coordinated unit, but as independent parts that are out of sync. She has never been diagnosed with any known genetic syndrome or chromosomal abnormality that would help explain why.

In a recent paper for the journal “Mechanisms of Ageing and Development,” Walker and his co-authors, who include Pakula and All Children’s Hospital (St. Petersburg, Fla.) geneticist Maxine Sutcliffe chronicled a baffling range of inconsistencies in Brooke’s aging process. She still has baby teeth at 16, for instance. And her bone age is estimated to be more like 10 years old.

“There’ve been very minimal changes in Brooke’s brain,” Walker said. “Various parts of her body, rather than all being at the same stage, seem to be disconnected.”

Brooke’s mother, Melanie Greenberg, 48, sees a different picture. “She loves to shop,” Greenberg said. “Just like a woman.”

Brooke rides in a stroller while her mom shops for clothes in the infant sections of department stores near their home in a Baltimore suburb. That Brooke is in her mid-teens is so mind-boggling that if another mother with a toddler asks Greenberg how old Brooke is, she usually doesn’t try to explain.

“My system always has been to turn years into months,” Greenberg said. “So, if someone asked today, I might say, she’s 16 months old.”

CLICK HERE to see photos of Brooke through the years.

For more of Brooke’s story, watch the documentary, “Child Frozen In Time,” Sunday, Aug. 2 at 10 p.m. on TLC.

The Toddler Who Rebels Like a Teen

Brooke weighs 16 pounds and is 30 inches tall. She doesn’t speak, but she laughs when she is happy, and she clearly recognizes the people around her. She has three sisters: Emily, 22; Caitlin, 19; and Carly, 13. All three are bright, active and of normal size and development. They say that Brooke has ways of expressing herself like the teenager she is.

“She looks like a 6-month-old, but she kind of has a personality of a 16-year-old,” Caitlin said. “Sometimes we joke about how she rebels.”

Brooke will resist and refuse activities that don’t appeal to her by vocalizing her displeasure, not with words, but with sounds typical of an infant. “She makes it known what she likes and what she doesn’t like,” sister Emily said.

Carly said it no longer seems strange to have an older sister who is still essentially an infant. “As I got older, she was just like another little sister to me,” she said.

In her first six years, Brooke went through a series of medical emergencies from which she recovered, often without explanation. She survived surgery for seven perforated stomach ulcers. She suffered a brain seizure followed by what was diagnosed as a stroke that weeks later left no apparent damage.

At 4, she fell into a lethargy that caused her to sleep for 14 days. Then, doctors diagnosed a brain tumor, and the Greenbergs bought a casket for her.

“We were preparing for our child to die,” Howard Greenberg said. “We were saying goodbye. And, then, we got a call that there was some change; that Brooke had opened her eyes and she was fine. There was no tumor. She overcomes every obstacle that is thrown her way.”

Brooke’s doctor said the source of her sudden illnesses remains a mystery.

“We often did not have a good explanation for why she became ill as quickly and intensely as she did,” Pakula said. “There were many times in which there were real doubts about her ability to survive.”

As she rocks back and forth in a baby swing, Brooke is fed through a tube inserted into her stomach, because her esophagus is so small that swallowed food could back up into her lungs and cause pneumonia.

Doctors recommended growth hormone therapy early in Brooke’s life, but the treatment produced no results.

Howard Greenberg recalled the follow-up visit to the endocrinologist. “We took her back in six months, and the doctor looked at us and said, ‘Why didn’t you give Brooke the growth hormones?’ And I said, ‘We gave Brooke the growth hormones. We gave her everything you told us to do.’ And Brooke didn’t put on a pound, an ounce; she didn’t grow an inch.”

Part of the Family

Brooke’s hair and her nails are the only two things that grow, Howard said. “She has pajamas and outfits that are 10 or 12 years old,” he said.

One of the things she loves most is movement. As Brooke lies on her stomach, Carly often steers her through the house on an ottoman. Brooke also likes to push against open kitchen drawers until they slam shut.

In her crib, “she’s very content,” Howard said. “She has very little conception of time.”

The family has placed a small television near the crib so she can watch whenever she pleases. Her father gets up in the middle of each night to check on her.

Brooke has a caretaker during daytime hours, but the family’s schedule revolves around her, year after year. The Greenbergs take no vacations, have few nights out and involve Brooke in as many family activities as possible. “To go to a swimming pool for the summer, or belong to a summer club … we tried all those things, and it’s lacking something,” her mother said. “Brooke’s not there. We’re not a family without Brooke.”

Brooke goes to a Baltimore County public school, Ridge Ruxton, dedicated to special education. Based on her age, she would be a junior in high school. Jewel Adiele, one of Brooke’s teachers, said she wonders sometimes what Brooke is thinking or perceiving.

“People who have worked with her in the past or who briefly see her say … there’s no change,” Adiele said. “But I think, in her heart, she changes. I think from day to day, there are changes. They’re not just as visible as you see in a lot of teens.”

To try to determine why Brooke’s aging process has been so irregular — and what it means to the understanding of our genetic makeup — Walker and Sutcliffe have studied samples of Brooke’s cells and DNA to look for what they think may be a genetic mutation never seen before that has affected the way she ages.

Walker, of the University of South Florida, believes that if the gene can be isolated, it may provide clues to questions about why we age and die.

“Without being sensational, I’d say this is an opportunity for us to answer the question, why we’re mortal, or at least to test it,” Walker said. “And if we’re wrong, we can discard it. But if we’re right, we’ve got the golden ring.”

A Key to Understanding How We Age?

If the gene — or complex of genes — is identified, Walker plans to test laboratory animals to determine whether the gene can be switched off and, if so, whether it will cause the animal’s aging to slow.

In the long term, the idea that the aging process might somehow be manipulated raises serious questions about what human beings might do with that knowledge.

“Clearly, that’s the science fiction aspect of it,” said Walker, describing the social and ethical dilemmas that would arise. “We can’t have continued reproduction and people who don’t age.”

One possible reason to slow the aging process, Walker suggested, would be to allow astronauts to travel in space for long periods of time. “But right now, it’s only conjecture,” he said.

Neither Walker nor Pakula, her doctor, can speculate how long Brooke’s life might be. “That’s more of a crystal ball question,” Pakula said. “I think there’s no way of knowing. “

The visual evidence of that unpredictable future is always there in the family pictures — photographs in which everyone but Brooke is aging.

The Greenbergs are fascinated by the promise that a scientific breakthrough may stem from Brooke, whose own life is governed by the most basic elements: food and shelter; a family’s love; and their ability to see in her far more than meets the eye, having come to terms with the prospect that she will never grow up.

“We love her just the way she is,” Melanie Greenberg said. “We don’t want to change her.”

Added Howard Greenberg, “Brooke is the nucleus of our family. What if Brooke holds the secret to aging? We’d like to find out. We’d like to help people. Everybody’s here for a reason. Maybe this is why Brooke is here.”

For more of Brooke’s story, watch the documentary, “Child Frozen In Time,” Sunday, Aug. 2 at 10 p.m. on TLC.

Cambridge University researchers working on portable personal power consumption meter

Researchers ready personal energy monitoring devices

6.17.09 / John Walko / EE Times

LONDON — Researchers at Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory are developing a device that will record people’s daily energy consumption, including how they travel, the heating and appliances they use and also the indirect energy they use from the manufacture of food and goods that they consume.

The project is part of a wider research programme at the University called Computing for the Future of the Planet.

Dubbed the Personal Energy Meter (PEM), the research team suggests the final version could be a separate device or one embedded into a mobile phone.

“The research is in its early stages and personal energy meters will never become compulsory but the growing awareness of personal responsibility to the environment combined with the popularity of social networking and willingness to share information make the idea of PEM an achievable goal,” says Professor Andy Hopper who heads up the Computer Lab at the University of Cambridge.

The PEM is just one strand of current research into Computing for the Future of the Planet. Other areas include optimising digital infrastructures to reduce power consumption; developing computing techniques to make consistent and reliable predictions; harnessing more information to understand our changing environment and optimise the use of resources; and exploring the shift from physical to digital operations.

“We face considerable technical and practical challenges,” said Simon Hay of Cambridge University’s Computer Lab. “Our Personal Energy Meter builds on existing environmental foot-printing efforts by considering if it is possible to apportion a fair share of the energy consumed by an activity or artefact down to a personal level. We believe that it is possible to make the process virtually automatic, so that PEM users are free to go about their day normally without manually entering data.”

Hay adds the increasing use of mobile phones makes it an obvious device to host the PEM that will also minimise the energy overhead of manufacturing and using the PEM itself.

The type of techniques used to estimate energy consumed on a particular journey are said to include embedded data mining, inertial sensors and GPS.

How humans have genetically programmed incentives to get into a herd mentality

How to control a herd of humans

2.4.09 / David Robson / New Scientist

Read our related editorial: The Obama factor, revealed

HITLER and Mussolini both had the ability to bend millions of people to their fascist will. Now evidence from psychology and neurology is emerging to explain how tactics like organised marching and propaganda can work to exert mass mind control.

Scott Wiltermuth of Stanford University in California and colleagues have found that activities performed in unison, such as marching or dancing, increase loyalty to the group. “It makes us feel as though we’re part of a larger entity, so we see the group’s welfare as being as important as our own,” he says.

Wiltermuth’s team separated 96 people into four groups who performed these tasks together: listening to a song while silently mouthing the words, singing along, singing and dancing, or listening to different versions of the song so that they sang and danced out of sync. In a later game, when asked to decide whether to stick with the group or strive for personal gain, those in the non-synchronised group behaved less loyally than the rest (Psychological Science, vol 20, p 1).

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville thinks this research helps explain why fascist leaders, amongst others, use organised marching and chanting to whip crowds into a frenzy of devotion to their cause, though these tactics can be used just as well for peace, he stresses. Community dances and group singing can ease local tension, for example – a theory he plans to test experimentally (Journal of Legal Studies, DOI: 10.1086/529447).

Meanwhile, the powerful unifying effects of propaganda images are being explored by Charles Seger at Indiana University at Bloomington. His team primed students with pictures of their university – college sweatshirts or the buildings themselves – then asked how highly they scored on different emotions, such as pride or happiness. The primed students gave a strikingly similar emotional profile, in contrast with non-primed students (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2008.12.004).

Interest in the idea of a herd mentality has been renewed by work into mirror neurons – cells that fire when we perform an action or watch someone perform a similar action. It suggests that our brains are geared to mimic our peers. “We are set up for ‘auto-copy’,” says Haidt.

Interest in the idea of a herd mentality has been renewed by research into mirror neurons

Neurological evidence seems to back this idea. Vasily Klucharev, at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, found that the brain releases more of the reward chemical dopamine when we fall in line with the group consensus (Neuron, vol 61, p 140). His team asked 24 women to rate more than 200 women for attractiveness. If a participant discovered their ratings did not tally with that of the others, they tended to readjust their scores. When a woman realised her differing opinion, fMRI scans revealed that her brain generated what the team dubbed an “error signal”. This has a conditioning effect, says Klucharev: it’s how we learn to follow the crowd.

Read our related editorial: The Obama factor, revealed

New study suggests “lost world” of dinosaurs escaped extinction

“Lost World” of Dinosaurs Survived Mass Extinction?

5.1.09 / Brian Handwark / National Geographic

An isolated group of dinosaurs somehow survived the catastrophic event that wiped out most of their kind some 65.5 million years ago, a new study suggests. Dinosaurs of this “lost world,” in a remote region of the U.S. West, may have outlived their doomed relatives by as much as half a million years, according to James Fassett, an emeritus scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Fassett, who has argued for years that some dinosaurs survived the mass extinction, based his latest work on fossils from the San Juan Basin in what is now Colorado and New Mexico.

There, the bones of hadrosaurs, tyrannosaurs, anklyosaurs, and several other species were found together in a sandstone formation that dates to the Paleocene epoch—the time period after the so-called Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) extinction event, which is thought to have killed off the dinosaurs.

As with his past research, Fassett’s latest find is likely to continue sparking controversy among paleontologists.

“Every few years someone claims to have [found] Paleocene ’surviving’ dinosaurs,” said Hans-Dieter Sues, associate director for research and collections at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.

But so far, such fossils have eventually turned out to be older remains.

“Unequivocal Evidence”

In his new study, appearing in the April 2009 issue of the journal Palaeontologia Electronica, Fassett argues that a single hadrosaur fossil helps prove that the San Juan dinos really are from the Paleocene.

After previous “survivor” finds, it was determined that the dinosaurs in question, initially entombed in sand or mud, had their bones exposed again later by natural forces such as river erosion.

The bones were then redeposited in younger rock layers, making them appear to belong to an earlier era.

But paleontologists found a concentration of 34 bones from a single hadrosaur in the San Juan Basin sandstone.

“That’s unequivocal evidence I think,” Fassett said. River-washed bones would be widely scattered and also show signs of wear and tear—unlike the current fossils, some of which he describes as “pristine.”

Working with colleagues at the USGS in Denver, Fassett also examined the concentrations of uranium and rare-earth metals in the fossil bones.

“I thought if we could determine the trace-element compositions of the bones, we might discover that the [older] Cretaceous bones had a different chemical fingerprint than the [younger Paleocene] bones do,” he said, “and indeed that turned out to be the case.”

No Reason Why Not

It’s not known why some species, including crocodiles and birds, survived the K-T event while many others did not. The answer could be tied to what exactly caused the mass extinction.

The popular theory is that a killer asteroid struck the Yucatán Peninsula, although experts have argued for massive volcanism, disease, climate change, or some combination of factors.

(Related: “‘Dinosaur Killer’ Asteroid Only One Part of New Quadruple Whammy Theory.”)

Fassett, who supports the asteroid-strike theory, said he can’t explain why dinosaurs may have survived longer in some areas but not others.

“One guess is that the survivors lived in the northernmost parts of North America, at the greatest distance from the impact site, and then migrated south,” he said.

“But that doesn’t explain why [dinosaurs that lived later] haven’t been found elsewhere. We don’t have an answer for that.”

Despite his caution, the Smithsonian’s Sues said that the idea of Paleocene dinosaurs can’t yet be dismissed.

“There is no a priori reason that dinosaurs could not have survived in some places,” he wrote in an email to National Geographic News.

“Indeed, other than in the [U.S.] western interior and in Europe, we have as yet no concrete evidence when dinosaurs vanished.”

Japanese scientist grows monkey organs in sheep

Japanese scientist claims breakthrough with organ grown in sheep

5.5.09 / Leo Lewis / UK Sunday Times Online

The performance artist Stelios Arcadiou shows the ear implanted on his arm

Huddled at the back of her shed, bleating under a magnificent winter coat and tearing cheerfully at a bale of hay, she is possibly the answer to Japan’s chronic national shortage of organ donors: a sheep with a revolutionary secret.

Guided by one of the animal’s lab-coated creators, the visitor’s hand is led to the creature’s underbelly and towards a spot in the middle under eight inches of greasy wool. Lurking there is a spare pancreas.

If the science that put it there can be pushed further forward, Japan may be spared an ethical and practical crisis that has split medical and political opinion.

As the sheep-based chimera organ technology stands at the moment, says the man who is pioneering it, the only viable destination for the pancreas underneath his sheep would be a diabetic chimpanzee.

The organ growing on the sheep was generated from monkey stem cells but the man behind the science, Yutaka Hanazono, believes that the technology could be developed eventually to make sheep into walking organ banks for human livers, hearts, pancreases and skin.

It could happen within a decade, he guesses, perhaps two.

“We have made some very big advances here. There has historically been work on the potential of sheep as producers of human blood, but we are only slowly coming closer to the point where we can harvest sheep for human organs,” Professor Hanazono told The Times.

“We have shown that in vivo (in a living animal) creation of organs is more efficient than making them in vitro (in a test tube) but now we really need to hurry.”

The reason for Professor Hanazono’s sense of urgency — and for the entire organ harvest project being undertaken at the Jichi Medical University — lies many miles away in Tokyo and with a historical peculiarity of the Japanese legal system.

Japan defines death as the point when the heart permanently stops. The concept of brain death — the phase at which organs can most effectively be harvested from donors — does exist, but organs cannot be extracted at that point.

The long-term effect of the legal definition has been striking: organ donation in Japan is virtually nonexistent, forcing many people to travel abroad in search of transplants. In the United States, the rate of organ donors per million people is about 27; in Japan it is under 0.8.

The effect, say paediatricians, has been especially severe for children. The same law that discounts brain death as suitable circumstances for organ donation broadly prevents children under 15 from allowing their organs to be harvested.

To make matters worse, international restrictions on transplant tourism are becoming ever tougher, making Japan’s position even more untenable. To avert disaster, say doctors, Japan either needs the science of synthetic organ generation to advance faster than seems possible, or it needs a complete rethink on the Japanese definition of death.

In response to the impending crisis, and with Professor Hanazono’s sheep still very much at the experimental stage, a series of revisions to the transplant law have been proposed, but the debate has been divisive.

Taro Nakayama, the MP behind the most liberal revision — a change that would allow organs to be harvested from the brain-dead — is a former paediatrician. “Organ tourism is finished and Japan has to change its ways very quickly,” he said.

Gene genies

— In 1997 US scientist Dr Jay Vacanti grew a human ear from cartilage cells on the back of a mouse. He said he believed that it might be possible to grow knee cartilage and even a human liver

— In 2007 two scientists at the University of Nevada created a sheep with 15 per cent human cells as part of research into farming human organs from animals. Human cells were injected into a sheep’s foetus

— Last month Stelios Arcadiou, an Australian artist, unveiled an ear implanted on his arm. He planned to broadcast the sounds it would “hear” on the internet

— Last week Korean scientists said they had cloned beagles that glowed in the dark. Four puppies were created from cells injected with a gene that made them glow red under UV light

Italian geophysicist who predicted earthquake was told to take findings off the internet by government

Scientist who predicted quake muzzled

4.7.09 / Reuters

An Italian scientist predicted a major earthquake around L’Aquila weeks before disaster struck the city, killing more than 100 people, but was reported to authorities for spreading panic.

The government insisted the warning, by seismologist Gioacchino Giuliani, had no scientific foundation but Giuliani said he had been vindicated and wanted an apology.

The first tremors in the region were felt in mid-January and continued at regular intervals, creating mounting alarm in the medieval city, about 100 km east of Rome.

Vans with loudspeakers drove around the town a month ago telling locals to evacuate their houses after Giuliani, from the National Institute of Astrophysics, predicted a large quake was on the way, prompting the mayor’s anger.

Giuliani, who based his forecast on concentrations of radon gas around seismically active areas, was reported to police for “spreading alarm” and was forced to remove his findings from the Internet.

“Now there are people who have to apologise to me and who will have what has happened on their conscience,” Giuliani told the website of the daily La Repubblica.

Giuliani, who lives in L’Aquila and developed his findings while working at the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in the surrounding Abruzzo region, said he was helpless to act on Sunday as it became clear to him the quake was imminent.

“I didn’t know who to turn to, I had been put under investigation for saying there was going to be an earthquake.”

Agency reassured townspeople

As the media asked whether, in light of his warnings, the government had protected the population properly, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi seemed on the defensive at a news conference.

He said people should concentrate on relief efforts for now and “we can discuss afterwards about the predictability of earthquakes”.

Italy’s Civil Protection agency held a meeting of the Major Risks Committee, grouping scientists charged with assessing such risks, in L’Aquila on March 31 to reassure the townspeople.

“The tremors being felt by the population are part of a typical sequence … (which is) absolutely normal in a seismic area like the one around L’Aquila,” the agency said in a statement on the eve of that meeting.

It said it saw no reason for alarm but was nonetheless carrying out “continuous monitoring and attention”.

The head of the agency, Guido Bertolaso, referred back to that meeting at Monday’s joint news conference with Berlusconi.

“There is no possibility of predicting an earthquake, that is the view of the international scientific community,” he said.  Enzo Boschi, the head of the National Geophysics Institute, said the real problem for Italy was a long-standing failure to take proper precautions despite a history of tragic quakes.

“We have earthquakes but then we forget and do nothing. It’s not in our culture to take precautions or build in an appropriate way in areas where there could be strong earthquakes,” he said.

Honda’s thought controlled Asimo robot

Honda connects brain thoughts with robotics

3.31.09 / Yuri Kageyama / San Francisco Chronicle

(03-31) 11:29 PDT TOKYO, Japan (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. 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.

Honda said the technology wasn’t quite ready for a live demonstration because of possible distractions in the person’s thinking. Another problem is that brain patterns differ greatly among individuals, and so about two to three hours of studying them in advance are needed for the technology to work.

The company, a leader in robotics, acknowledged the technology was still at a basic research stage with no immediate practical applications in the works.

“I’m talking about dreams today,” said Yasuhisa Arai, executive at Honda Research Institute Japan Co., the company’s research unit. “Practical uses are still way into the future.”

Japan boasts one of the leading robotics industries in the world, and the government is pushing to develop the industry as a road to growth.

Research on the brain is being tackled around the world, but Honda said its research was among the most advanced in figuring out a way to read brain patterns without having to hurt the person, such as embedding sensors into the skin.

Honda has made robotics a centerpiece of its image, sending Asimo to events and starring the walking, talking robot in TV ads. Among the challenges for the brain technology is to make the reading-device smaller so it can be portable, according to Honda.

Arai didn’t rule out the possibility of a car that may some day drive itself — even without a steering wheel.

“Our products are for people to use. It is important for us to understand human behavior,” he said. “We think this is the ultimate in making machines move.”

Neurosky Inc. to release brain-computer interface technology for PCs

NeuroSky to Launch Brainwave-Based Technology for Stereo Headsets for Personal Computers

3.26.09 / PRNewswire

SAN JOSE, Calif., March 26 /PRNewswire/ — NeuroSky, Inc., a bio-sensor technology company in Silicon Valley, announces today the launching of the MindSet(TM), a brainwave-reading (EEG) and mental state translational technology for a wireless Bluetooth(R) headset that operates with most personal computer (PC) products. With Uncle Milton, a toy company, announcing the Force Trainer(TM) product in January, 2009 (under a Lucas Licensing deal) incorporating the NeuroSky sensor, this announcement represents the first Brain-Computer-Interface (BCI) peripheral that can be integrated in the mainstream of personal computer users.

The MindSet headset resembles a pair of headphones with one distinct difference–an electrode-laden arm that is in contact with the user’s forehead. The electrode reads the electrical potentials found on the skin’s surface and induced by the neuron activity occurring in the frontal lobe of the user’s brain. Various “mental states” of the users, for example their level of focus and relaxation, can be deciphered from the brainwave patterns. That information can be passed to a variety of PC-based applications for entertainment, health, wellness, education, and training.

The MindSet may now be pre-ordered by consumers and by application developers on the NeuroSky website (www.NeuroSky.com). The first of such headsets integrating the MindSet will be available to order online under the NeuroSky brand for U.S. residents on June 1, 2009, and roll out into select international markets later this year. With a $199 MSRP, the MindSet will be accompanied by two demonstration games, Brainwave Visualizer(TM) and NeuroBoy’s Adventure(TM). Alternative application developer programs will be available on a worldwide basis through NeuroSky. Both consumers and developers will be offered further incentives with this summer’s launch of the NeuroSky Application Store, a portal of downloadable, third-party applications emanating from the NeuroSky Developer Network.

“This application developer program plays an important role in fusing brainwave-enabled peripherals into the mass market of computer users,” comments Hitoshi Tokuda, General Manager of the PC Options Marketing Division at Toshiba Corporation, a leading manufacturer and marketer of notebook PCs as well as other electrical and electronic products and systems, that plans to launch its own headset integrating the technology. Stanley Yang, the CEO of NeuroSky, considers this plan as a strategic milestone. “We are honored by the comment to this next generation of PC peripheral products and the establishment of an important beachhead for brainwave-reading technology within the PC community.”

About NeuroSky

Founded in 2004 and headquartered in San Jose, CA, NeuroSky has developed cost-effective and “wearable” (dry) bio-sensor and signal processing technology specifically designed for end-use in the consumer market. NeuroSky’s products offer opportunities for its exclusive partners and developers to create next generation applications in markets as diverse as consumer electronics, health & wellness, education & training, transportation, market research and others. For more information about NeuroSky, please visit www.neurosky.com.

For press inquiries regarding NeuroSky, please contact.

Tansy Brook – tansy@neurosky.com – 415-215-6519

This news release contains forward-looking statements, as defined in the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which are based on the current view of management on future events. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

SOURCE NeuroSky, Inc.

Japanese government says nurse robots will be in wide use in just five years

Commercialization of nurse robots seen in 5 years

3.26.09 / Japan Today

TOKYO —

Robots designed to provide day-care and nursing services will be put into practical use at Japanese households in as soon as five years, a government panel said Wednesday. Based on the projection, the government and the private sector will accelerate their efforts to formulate common safety standards for nurse robots in the years ahead, industry ministry officials said.

To create a new robot market, the officials said the establishment of safety standards by a third party in a neutral way will be essential. The New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization, a government-backed entity, will launch a new five-year project in April that has a strong focus on improving safety technology and standards of the next-generation robots, they said.

Japan’s view is that robots will play a key role in supporting the country’s rapidly aging population.

As about 7% of industrial robots in the world are made by Japanese companies, the government is hoping that expansion of the industry will also lead to a promising source of economic growth.

In Japan alone, the robot market is expected to total around 6.2 trillion yen in 2025, of which 4.2 trillion yen will likely be linked to day care and nursing, according to the officials.