Slashdot Mirror
Mixing brain cells and nanodots
Roland Piquepaille writes "It's not the first time that animal brain cells have been used in conjunction with nanoparticles. But now, a team of Israeli researchers have grown self-organizing networks of rat brain cells by binding them to carbon nanotubes. In a short article, New Scientist reports that these neural networks are remarkably stable, surviving for almost three months in the lab. These hybrid networks could be used in future biological sensors. For example, they could identify a poison by measuring its effect on such a network of brain cells."
Wow...that is just awful and not right! You are a bad, bad person! How do you sleep at night?
:D
proc DetectPoison()
{
global $NeuralActivity;
return $NeuralActivity == 0;
}
There, that's better.
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
Nanodot? It's a catchall term for one of those nano-sized spherical looking things.
A buckyball is a kind of nanodot. Some micelles could be considered nanodots.
HTH...
You scheming bastard... :P
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
When reading the parent comment, I thought it was a little bit odd that it was talking about stem cells when the article has nothing to do with stem cells. After a quick google search, it turns out that the parent comment is actually a verbatim copy of a comment by someone else on a story last year:
4 &cid=14316980
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=17190
In fact, just about all the prior comments by "janet-on" seem to be verbatim copies of comments made by other people. The trick seems to work rather well, considering that the previous three comments all got modded to a score of 5, and the current comment is now at score 4.
Personally, I'm guessing that "janet-on" is a bot someone made to try to accumulate karma, to allow them to moderate comments.