Working Nerve Chip

poetic writes: "Two scientists from Munich have succeeded in creating a nerve chip with silicon and snail nerves. The cells were hindered from growing away from the silicon with a plastic fence. They managed to get a signal to go from silicon through a neural circuit and back to the chip again. Cute, one step closer to a decent uplink! See the abstract at Nature's site."

Comments

Screw the brain/computer tap...

[KC7GR]

I find it sad that the first thing someone thought about when they saw this story was that it brought us one step closer to a (completely unnecessary, and downright dangerous in my eyes) machine-to-brain interface.

Hello?! Did it ever occur to such people that such a device has great possibilities for repairing or bypassing damaged nerves in, say, folks who have been paralyzed? Yeegads, people! Get a clue! If this can be made to work effectively in humans, it's just possible that the wheelchair-bound could regain their mobility!

We've got enough info overload right now without being linked to a bunch of frelling computers. Let's think of giving someone with, say, cerebral palsy a whole new and stable degree of motor control before we start browsing the web on the insides of our retinas, hmmm?