Posted by
michael
on from the central-brain-unit dept.
pommaq writes: "Nature reports that some crafty scientists in Austin have soldered nerve cells to little semiconductors. The full story is here. Am I the only one thinking it'd be cool to control my keyboard with my mind?"
Controlling my computer with my mind sounds pretty good, but soldering any of my nervecells sounds incredibly painful. Actually, any soldering of any part of my body just seems like a bad idea.
It would be kinda cool if I lost my hand or something I could solder in a Palm Pilot, but still it just seems too borgish. Hmmm... but hey, soldering in my DreamCast game controller and now we're talking. Man, talk about reaction times on Soul Caliber...
Useful as biosensors
by
m_evanchik
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This is sort of old news, as the article itself details, neurons and silicon have been linked before.
The article also makes it fairly clear that from a computational point of view, protein has no clear benefits over silicon
Where these silicon/protein hybrid circuits are potentially immediately useful, as outlined by the article, is in the fields of prosthetics and biosensors.
A quick search on google for bioterrorism sensors gives one a pretty good idea of how much advances need to be made in this field.
Re:Useful as biosensors
by
Winged+Cat
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
A quick search on google for bioterrorism sensors gives one a pretty good idea of how much advances need to be made in this field.
Not quite. Bioterrorism sensors detect chemicals, spores, and the like. Integrating neurons and silicon is more a matter of decoding the signals: translating from messy bioelectric signals into smooth artificial electronic ones and vice versa. Much work remains to be done in both areas, but it's not the same work.
I was doing this in 1988 with chicken-embryo myoblasts and chips we had made in the MOSIS program.
MOSIS was commercially donated semiconductor fab capacity normally used to fab circuits for student projects. We used it to make an array of open pads on which we placed the myoblasts (clumps of neural/muscular tissue that fired occasionally without being stimulated).
The pads were connected to a multiplexer and an amplifier fabbed on the same chip.
But we weren't the first to do that, just the first to use common silicon processes to do it. No patent for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Controlling my computer with my mind sounds pretty good, but soldering any of my nervecells sounds incredibly painful. Actually, any soldering of any part of my body just seems like a bad idea.
It would be kinda cool if I lost my hand or something I could solder in a Palm Pilot, but still it just seems too borgish. Hmmm... but hey, soldering in my DreamCast game controller and now we're talking. Man, talk about reaction times on Soul Caliber...
-Russ
Me
This is sort of old news, as the article itself details, neurons and silicon have been linked before.
The article also makes it fairly clear that from a computational point of view, protein has no clear benefits over silicon
Where these silicon/protein hybrid circuits are potentially immediately useful, as outlined by the article, is in the fields of prosthetics and biosensors.
A quick search on google for bioterrorism sensors gives one a pretty good idea of how much advances need to be made in this field.
evanchik.net
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
those blasted 'puters have been gettin on my nerves for ages! 'Bout time we got our nerves on them!
Liberty uber alles.
I was doing this in 1988 with chicken-embryo myoblasts and chips we had made in the MOSIS program.
MOSIS was commercially donated semiconductor fab capacity normally used to fab circuits for student projects. We used it to make an array of open pads on which we placed the myoblasts (clumps of neural/muscular tissue that fired occasionally without being stimulated).
The pads were connected to a multiplexer and an amplifier fabbed on the same chip.
But we weren't the first to do that, just the first to use common silicon processes to do it. No patent for me.
--Blair