MIT Develops New, Different Rat-Brained Robot

MImeKillEr writes "Here's an article that explains that MIT has developed a coffee-cup sized robot that uses neurons from rat embryos embedded in silicon. It's the first instance in which cultured neurons have been used to control a robotic mechanism. This was made possible by placing a droplet of solution containing thousands of rat neuron cells onto a silicon chip that's embedded with 60 electrodes connected to an amplifier. The electrical signals that the cells fire at one another are picked up by the electrodes which then send the amplified signal into a computer. The computer, in turn, wirelessly relays the data to the robot."

Comments

Democracy JUST DOESN'T WORK

[PhysicsGenius]

I for one welcome our new rat overlords and would like to mention that particle physicists will be very useful to them in synthesizing low-fat cheese substitutes.

Great...

[portege00]

Now I'll need robot traps AND mouse traps. Thanks, MIT!

In other news...

[quintessent]

Recent investigation reveals that Slashdot has eliminated all of its editors. In their place, a prototype RatBot seems to have been posting stories and adding comments.

"We became suspicious when some readers noticed an improvement in the journalistic quality of story postings," reported one investigator, adding, "Now that we've gotten to the bottom of this, we're not sure if we want to change things back."