While Dr. Stuart Meloy was working on a new device to treat chronic pain, he was surprised to discover it could also bring pleasure to his female patients.
While Meloy, an anesthesiologist and pain specialist in Winston-Salem, was putting an electrode into the spine of a female patient with chronic back pain, the woman reported a decrease in her pain and a delightful, but very unexpected, side effect.
"When we turned on the power in this case, she let out a moan and began hyperventilating," Meloy said on ABC News' Good Morning America. "Of course we cut the power and I looked around the drapes and asked her what was going on. Once she caught her breath, she said 'you're gonna have to teach my husband how to do that!' "
Meloy soon realized he may have discovered a device that could help thousands of women who have trouble achieving orgasm.
"The device is the use of a pre-existing device called a spinal cord stimulator," he said. "Instead of treating chronic pain with the stimulator, we're treating orgasmic dysfunction," Meloy said.
In a surgical procedure done in his office, Meloy implants the electrodes from this device into the back of the patient, at the bottom part of the spinal cord. When the electrodes are stimulated with a remote control, the brain interprets the signal as an orgasm, he said. The device is about the size of a pacemaker and can be turned on and off with a handheld remote control.
The possibility of using plasmonic covers to drastically reduce the total scattering cross section of spherical and cylindrical objects is discussed. While it is intuitively expected that increasing the physical size of an object may lead to an increase in its overall scattering cross section, here we see how a proper design of these lossless metamaterial covers near their plasma resonance may induce a dramatic drop in the scattering cross section, making the object nearly invisible to an observer, a phenomenon with obvious applications for low observability and non invasive probe design. Physical insights into this phenomenon and some numerical results are provided.
Listening to his album, most of the songs are good.
Does your friend sell any of his music online, by chance? What sort of music is it? I (and perhaps other slashdotters) might be interested in hearing it.
Very easy to make statements like that on slashdot, but try doing it in a forum where a majority of the people you're speaking to are "crippled".
Yeah, it'd be pretty amusing to see a slashdotter on http://www.freerepublic.com/. Sometimes I do enjoy participating in the evolution/creationist debates there, though.
Revival and identification of bacterial spores in 25- to 40-million-year-old Dominican amber.
Cano RJ, Borucki MK.
A bacterial spore was revived, cultured, and identified from the abdominal contents of extinct bees preserved for 25 to 40 million years in buried Dominican amber. Rigorous surface decontamination of the amber and aseptic procedures were used during the recovery of the bacterium. Several lines of evidence indicated that the isolated bacterium was of ancient origin and not an extant contaminant. The characteristic enzymatic, biochemical, and 16S ribosomal DNA profiles indicated that the ancient bacterium is most closely related to extant Bacillus sphaericus.
In google's case, I don't think it's so much anthropomorphizing the company as it is the algorithms behind it. Anybody have bets on how long until Google's algorithms become sentient?;)
It's just like the possible methane - people are letting their imaginations run *way* ahead of the evidence.
Just a footnote: It turned out that this previous story regarding life on Mars turned out to just be shoddy journalism. The supposed "private meeting with space officials" was actually just a party. The researchers had no idea there was a reporter there, and the entire story was basically based on second-hand party gossip.
A statement from one of the supposedly-quoted researchers:
A story has appeared in Space.com which quotes us inaccurately and without permission. The story is based on hearsay and is factually incorrect.
Here are the facts:
1. On Sunday night we were attending a private party of space exploration enthusiasts in which there was a discussion about the possible meaning of the results from recent Mars missions. We engaged in the discussion and expressed thoughts and opinions as individual scientists on our own time and did not represent ourselves as speaking for NASA.
2. No one at the party identified themselves as a reporter, and in fact no reporters were present. This article is based on hearsay about what somebody at the party thought they heard us say. We think this represents extremely poor journalistic standards.
3. No Nature paper has been submitted with Rio Tinto results. This claim is simply wrong and we did not make this claim. The MARTE project has several papers in preparation that describe the work we are doing at Rio Tinto and the first results of that work, but nothing has been submitted yet. Preliminary results have been published in abstract form at various scientific meetings. If you want to see what the MARTE team has actually said about results from Rio Tinto drilling and its relevance to life on Mars, go to www.marteproject.com and click on publications. All our REAL publications are posted there.
4. The work at Rio Tinto is relevant to finding life in a subsurface terrestrial environment and can't be used to infer anything about life on Mars, directly. The Rio Tinto work by its very nature can't tell us if there is life on Mars, but certainly helps formulate the strategy for how to search for life on Mars. One approach to searching for extant life on Mars is by drilling. Partly for this reason, the MARTE project was selected for funding by NASA's ASTEP program, out of the Science Mission Directorate and is a joint project between NASA and Spain's Center for Astrobiology
I don't know if the article was referring to this, but scientists have previously found that using TMS to stimulate certain brain areas can invoke a sensation of instant happiness.
A doctor even discovered that stimulating certain nerves in a woman's lower spinal cord can cause her to instantly orgasm. It's currently being looked into as a treatment for women with sexual disorders.
Alas, I have no idea how reputable a journal the Journal of Integrative Neuroscience is.
I do agree that there may very well be some fishiness. Hopefully some more noted neuroscience will try replicating the experiments. Unfortunately, experiments of some sort are illegal (or at least difficult to get permission for) in the US; at least that's what I was informed when I looked into the possibility of trying to replicate the results.
Personally, I prefer wiggle images, where you make an animated GIF of two close-by images. You don't have to hurt your eyes, and it gives you a good idea of depth. Here's a web site with several "wiggle images" made from Mars Rover data:
1500 imaginary mod points to whoever uses GIMP or Photoshop to cut the individual images out of the photos of Titan, makes an animated GIF out of them, and posts them online.
A year or two ago the New York Times had a neat article titled Savant for a Day about research by Prof. Allan Snyder. Basically, he uses a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to temporarily induce savant-like symptoms in volunteers. The journalist writing the story also acted as a volunteer, and experienced greatly-increased drawing ability while the device was turned on.
From the article:
As remarkable as the cat-drawing lesson was, it was just a hint of Snyder's work and its implications for the study of cognition. He has used TMS dozens of times on university students, measuring its effect on their ability to draw, to proofread and to perform difficult mathematical functions like identifying prime numbers by sight. Hooked up to the machine, 40 percent of test subjects exhibited extraordinary, and newfound, mental skills. That Snyder was able to induce these remarkable feats in a controlled, repeatable experiment is more than just a great party trick; it's a breakthrough that may lead to a revolution in the way we understand the limits of our own intelligence -- and the functioning of the human brain in general.
Snyder's work began with a curiosity about autism. Though there is little consensus about what causes this baffling -- and increasingly common -- disorder, it seems safe to say that autistic people share certain qualities: they tend to be rigid, mechanical and emotionally dissociated. They manifest what autism's great ''discoverer,'' Leo Kanner, called ''an anxiously obsessive desire for the preservation of sameness.'' And they tend to interpret information in a hyperliteral way, using ''a kind of language which does not seem intended to serve interpersonal communication.''...
In a 1999 paper called ''Is Integer Arithmetic Fundamental to Mental Processing? The Mind's Secret Arithmetic,'' Snyder and D. John Mitchell considered the example of an autistic infant, whose mind ''is not concept driven. . . . In our view such a mind can tap into lower level details not readily available to introspection by normal individuals.'' These children, they wrote, seem ''to be aware of information in some raw or interim state prior to it being formed into the 'ultimate picture.''' Most astonishing, they went on, ''the mental machinery for performing lightning fast integer arithmetic calculations could be within us all.''
And so Snyder turned to TMS, in an attempt, as he says, ''to enhance the brain by shutting off certain parts of it.''
I have no idea if you're already familiar with such research or if it'll be helpful at all, but I saw an interesting talk a week or so ago where the researcher mentioned therapeutic successes with autistic children playing with robots. I think the idea is that attempting to comprehend complex human emotional interactions is way too overwhelming, but trying to interact with more simple "emotions" from robots is easier and acts as a stepping stone to more complex understanding. Here are some interesting links:
Pseudoscientific "sixth-sense" garbage aside, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is a very fascinating brain area. I find the area interesting because it's the location of spindle neurons, which seem to be unique to humans and great apes. The concentration of spindle neurons is greatest in humans and decreases with evolutionary distance, indicating that these neurons may play a crucial role in what distinguishes human behavior from other animals. However, we still really have no idea about what their functional role is.
Recently, we have identified a class of neurons that are unique to humans and our closest relatives, the great apes. These are large spindle-shaped cells located in anterior cingulate cortex. Anterior cingulate cortex is reduced in both size and metabolic activity in autistic patients versus control subjects . The activity of the area is also reduced in patients with attention deficit disorder and depression. The activity in this area is increased in patients with obsessive-compulsive, phobic, post-traumatic stress, and anxiety disorders.
Area 24 appears to be an interface between emotion and cognition. The bottom part of area 24 controls autonomic functions such as heart rate and blood pressure, and is involved in the production and recognition of facial expressions. The experience of virtually any intense emotion whether it be anger, love, fear, or happiness is associated with the activation of the bottom part of area 24. By contrast, the top part of area 24 is activated whenever the subject is engaged in a cognitively demanding task. In EEG studies, a signal arises from this area when the subject is engaged in problem solving and the amplitude of this signal increases with task difficulty. When the subject makes an error there is a deflection of this signal, which is termed "error-related negativity". The anterior cingulate cortex monitors negative outcomes and initiates corrective behavior so as to achieve more optimal results. The spindle cells are a phylogenetically recent specialization in hominoids that relay information from area 24 to other parts of the brain during focused problem solving.
We believe that the spindle cells may be co-ordinating the activity of other brain areas during intense mental activity. Based on our examination of the ontogenetic series of human brains at the National Museum of Health and Science, the spindle cells are not discernable at birth, but rather appear to migrate into anterior cingulate cortex beginning about 4 months after birth. The emergence of the spindle cells in four month old human infants coincides with the infant's capacity to hold its head steady, track a object visually and reach for that object. The late development of the spindle cells could be important since there is evidence that other populations of post-natally generated neurons are heavily influenced by environmental factors. For example, the post-natally generated neurons in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus are very vulnerable to many stress-related events and their survival can be enhanced by enriched environments, physical activity and serotonin. If the survival of the spindle cells were similarly influenced by environmental conditions during infancy, it is conceivable that the resulting changes in circuitry could either enhance or degrade mental functioning as exemplified in problem-solving ability or vulnerability to psychiatric or learning disorders.
The above link has neat videos of the monkey moving the arm around.
Researchers like Schwartz who record from motor areas of the brain do cool stuff, but I'm personally more interested in folks like the Andersen Lab who do recording from more goal-oriented areas. Basically, it's a difference between a command to "move my elbow this much" versus "I want to grab this object."
Here's a PDF link to a paper published by Schwartz and others in 2002. Here's the abstract:
Direct Cortical Control of 3D Neuroprosthetic Devices
Dawn M. Taylor, Stephen I. Helms Tillery, Andrew B. Schwartz
Three-dimensional (3D) movement of neuroprosthetic devices can be controlled by the activity of cortical neurons when appropriate algorithms are used to decode intended movement in real time. Previous studies assumed that neurons maintain fixed tuning properties, and the studies used subjects who were unaware of the movements predicted by their recorded units. In this study, subjects had real-time visual feedback of their brain-controlled trajectories. Cell tuning properties changed when used for brain-controlled movements. By using control algorithms that track these changes, subjects made long sequences of 3D movements using far fewer cortical units than expected. Daily practice improved movement accuracy and the directional tuning of these units.
Efficient Bipedal Robots Based on Passive-Dynamic Walkers Steve Collins, Andy Ruina, Russ Tedrake, Martijn Wisse
Passive-dynamic walkers are simple mechanical devices, composed of solid parts connected by joints, that walk stably down a slope. They have no motors or controllers, yet can have remarkably humanlike motions. This suggests that these machines are useful models of human locomotion; however, they cannot walk on level ground. Here we present three robots based on passive-dynamics, with small active power sources substituted for gravity, which can walk on level ground. These robots use less control and less energy than other powered robots, yet walk more naturally, further suggesting the importance of passive-dynamics in human locomotion.
Last year Aviation Week & Space Technology had a detailed article on Bigelow Aerospace. I don't believe I've ever heard somebody refer to them as a pulp rag by any means.
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me a little bit of an article I read a little while back on a spinal cord stimulation device which has been dubbed the "Orgasmatron."
Article link
Snippet:
While Dr. Stuart Meloy was working on a new device to treat chronic pain, he was surprised to discover it could also bring pleasure to his female patients.
While Meloy, an anesthesiologist and pain specialist in Winston-Salem, was putting an electrode into the spine of a female patient with chronic back pain, the woman reported a decrease in her pain and a delightful, but very unexpected, side effect.
"When we turned on the power in this case, she let out a moan and began hyperventilating," Meloy said on ABC News' Good Morning America. "Of course we cut the power and I looked around the drapes and asked her what was going on. Once she caught her breath, she said 'you're gonna have to teach my husband how to do that!' "
Meloy soon realized he may have discovered a device that could help thousands of women who have trouble achieving orgasm.
"The device is the use of a pre-existing device called a spinal cord stimulator," he said. "Instead of treating chronic pain with the stimulator, we're treating orgasmic dysfunction," Meloy said.
In a surgical procedure done in his office, Meloy implants the electrodes from this device into the back of the patient, at the bottom part of the spinal cord. When the electrodes are stimulated with a remote control, the brain interprets the signal as an orgasm, he said. The device is about the size of a pacemaker and can be turned on and off with a handheld remote control.
Thanks!
Here's an obligatory link to the pre-print research paper and the abstract:
http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0502336
Achieving transparency with plasmonic coatings
Andrea Alu, Nader Engheta
The possibility of using plasmonic covers to drastically reduce the total scattering cross section of spherical and cylindrical objects is discussed. While it is intuitively expected that increasing the physical size of an object may lead to an increase in its overall scattering cross section, here we see how a proper design of these lossless metamaterial covers near their plasma resonance may induce a dramatic drop in the scattering cross section, making the object nearly invisible to an observer, a phenomenon with obvious applications for low observability and non invasive probe design. Physical insights into this phenomenon and some numerical results are provided.
Listening to his album, most of the songs are good.
Does your friend sell any of his music online, by chance? What sort of music is it? I (and perhaps other slashdotters) might be interested in hearing it.
The UN has estimated that for 81 billion dollars a year everyone on Earth could be fed. .. ...
And how much would it cost the year after that? How about a decade later?
Very easy to make statements like that on slashdot, but try doing it in a forum where a majority of the people you're speaking to are "crippled".
Yeah, it'd be pretty amusing to see a slashdotter on http://www.freerepublic.com/. Sometimes I do enjoy participating in the evolution/creationist debates there, though.
Germs from Mars would be the first against the wall when the T-cells rolled into town.
That's the best line I've seen on slashdot in quite some time.
Ooh, never mind, found it. Yay for google scholar:
= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=7538699&dopt=Citation
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd
Revival and identification of bacterial spores in 25- to 40-million-year-old Dominican amber.
Cano RJ, Borucki MK.
A bacterial spore was revived, cultured, and identified from the abdominal contents of extinct bees preserved for 25 to 40 million years in buried Dominican amber. Rigorous surface decontamination of the amber and aseptic procedures were used during the recovery of the bacterium. Several lines of evidence indicated that the isolated bacterium was of ancient origin and not an extant contaminant. The characteristic enzymatic, biochemical, and 16S ribosomal DNA profiles indicated that the ancient bacterium is most closely related to extant Bacillus sphaericus.
Is there by chance any documentation of that? It seems like a very striking finding, and I've never heard of it.
In google's case, I don't think it's so much anthropomorphizing the company as it is the algorithms behind it. Anybody have bets on how long until Google's algorithms become sentient? ;)
It's just like the possible methane - people are letting their imaginations run *way* ahead of the evidence.
= 418683#418683
Just a footnote: It turned out that this previous story regarding life on Mars turned out to just be shoddy journalism. The supposed "private meeting with space officials" was actually just a party. The researchers had no idea there was a reporter there, and the entire story was basically based on second-hand party gossip.
More details here:
http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p
A statement from one of the supposedly-quoted researchers:
A story has appeared in Space.com which quotes us
inaccurately and without permission. The story is based on hearsay
and is factually incorrect.
Here are the facts:
1. On Sunday night we were attending a private party
of space exploration enthusiasts in which there was a
discussion about the possible meaning of the results
from recent Mars missions. We engaged in the
discussion and expressed thoughts and opinions as
individual scientists on our own time and did not
represent ourselves as speaking for NASA.
2. No one at the party identified themselves as a
reporter, and in fact no reporters were present. This
article is based on hearsay about what somebody at the
party thought they heard us say. We think this
represents extremely poor journalistic standards.
3. No Nature paper has been submitted with Rio Tinto
results. This claim is simply wrong and we did not
make this claim. The MARTE project has several papers
in preparation that describe the work we are doing at
Rio Tinto and the first results of that work, but
nothing has been submitted yet. Preliminary results
have been published in abstract form at various
scientific meetings. If you want to see what the MARTE
team has actually said about results from Rio Tinto
drilling and its relevance to life on Mars, go to
www.marteproject.com and click on publications. All
our REAL publications are posted there.
4. The work at Rio Tinto is relevant to finding life
in a subsurface terrestrial environment and can't be
used to infer anything about life on Mars, directly.
The Rio Tinto work by its very nature can't tell us if
there is life on Mars, but certainly helps formulate
the strategy for how to search for life on Mars. One
approach to searching for extant life on Mars is by
drilling. Partly for this reason, the MARTE project
was selected for funding by NASA's ASTEP program, out
of the Science Mission Directorate and is a joint
project between NASA and Spain's Center for
Astrobiology
So you only value your gifts when nobody else has them?
I don't know if the article was referring to this, but scientists have previously found that using TMS to stimulate certain brain areas can invoke a sensation of instant happiness.
A doctor even discovered that stimulating certain nerves in a woman's lower spinal cord can cause her to instantly orgasm. It's currently being looked into as a treatment for women with sexual disorders.
A google scholar search turns up a couple of items. This is the only one which seems to be a research publication by him:
Savant-like skills exposed in normal people by suppressing the left fronto-temporal lobe (Journal of Integrative Neuroscience, 2003)
Alas, I have no idea how reputable a journal the Journal of Integrative Neuroscience is.
I do agree that there may very well be some fishiness. Hopefully some more noted neuroscience will try replicating the experiments. Unfortunately, experiments of some sort are illegal (or at least difficult to get permission for) in the US; at least that's what I was informed when I looked into the possibility of trying to replicate the results.
Awesome, thanks! ::awards 1500 imaginary mod points::
Personally, I prefer wiggle images, where you make an animated GIF of two close-by images. You don't have to hurt your eyes, and it gives you a good idea of depth. Here's a web site with several "wiggle images" made from Mars Rover data:
http://space.brownpau.com/mars-rover-wiggles/
1500 imaginary mod points to whoever uses GIMP or Photoshop to cut the individual images out of the photos of Titan, makes an animated GIF out of them, and posts them online.
A year or two ago the New York Times had a neat article titled Savant for a Day about research by Prof. Allan Snyder. Basically, he uses a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to temporarily induce savant-like symptoms in volunteers. The journalist writing the story also acted as a volunteer, and experienced greatly-increased drawing ability while the device was turned on.
...
From the article:
As remarkable as the cat-drawing lesson was, it was just a hint of Snyder's work and its implications for the study of cognition. He has used TMS dozens of times on university students, measuring its effect on their ability to draw, to proofread and to perform difficult mathematical functions like identifying prime numbers by sight. Hooked up to the machine, 40 percent of test subjects exhibited extraordinary, and newfound, mental skills. That Snyder was able to induce these remarkable feats in a controlled, repeatable experiment is more than just a great party trick; it's a breakthrough that may lead to a revolution in the way we understand the limits of our own intelligence -- and the functioning of the human brain in general.
Snyder's work began with a curiosity about autism. Though there is little consensus about what causes this baffling -- and increasingly common -- disorder, it seems safe to say that autistic people share certain qualities: they tend to be rigid, mechanical and emotionally dissociated. They manifest what autism's great ''discoverer,'' Leo Kanner, called ''an anxiously obsessive desire for the preservation of sameness.'' And they tend to interpret information in a hyperliteral way, using ''a kind of language which does not seem intended to serve interpersonal communication.''
In a 1999 paper called ''Is Integer Arithmetic Fundamental to Mental Processing? The Mind's Secret Arithmetic,'' Snyder and D. John Mitchell considered the example of an autistic infant, whose mind ''is not concept driven. . . . In our view such a mind can tap into lower level details not readily available to introspection by normal individuals.'' These children, they wrote, seem ''to be aware of information in some raw or interim state prior to it being formed into the 'ultimate picture.''' Most astonishing, they went on, ''the mental machinery for performing lightning fast integer arithmetic calculations could be within us all.''
And so Snyder turned to TMS, in an attempt, as he says, ''to enhance the brain by shutting off certain parts of it.''
I have no idea if you're already familiar with such research or if it'll be helpful at all, but I saw an interesting talk a week or so ago where the researcher mentioned therapeutic successes with autistic children playing with robots. I think the idea is that attempting to comprehend complex human emotional interactions is way too overwhelming, but trying to interact with more simple "emotions" from robots is easier and acts as a stepping stone to more complex understanding. Here are some interesting links:
http://www.neurodiversity.com/robotics.html
http://www.aurora-project.com/
Do you have any links from real news sources?
Pseudoscientific "sixth-sense" garbage aside, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is a very fascinating brain area. I find the area interesting because it's the location of spindle neurons, which seem to be unique to humans and great apes. The concentration of spindle neurons is greatest in humans and decreases with evolutionary distance, indicating that these neurons may play a crucial role in what distinguishes human behavior from other animals. However, we still really have no idea about what their functional role is.
c ells.htm
Wikipedia link
Here are some quotes from a page on them:
http://www.allmanlab.caltech.edu/research/spindle
Recently, we have identified a class of neurons that are unique to humans and our closest relatives, the great apes. These are large spindle-shaped cells located in anterior cingulate cortex. Anterior cingulate cortex is reduced in both size and metabolic activity in autistic patients versus control subjects . The activity of the area is also reduced in patients with attention deficit disorder and depression. The activity in this area is increased in patients with obsessive-compulsive, phobic, post-traumatic stress, and anxiety disorders.
Area 24 appears to be an interface between emotion and cognition. The bottom part of area 24 controls autonomic functions such as heart rate and blood pressure, and is involved in the production and recognition of facial expressions. The experience of virtually any intense emotion whether it be anger, love, fear, or happiness is associated with the activation of the bottom part of area 24. By contrast, the top part of area 24 is activated whenever the subject is engaged in a cognitively demanding task. In EEG studies, a signal arises from this area when the subject is engaged in problem solving and the amplitude of this signal increases with task difficulty. When the subject makes an error there is a deflection of this signal, which is termed "error-related negativity". The anterior cingulate cortex monitors negative outcomes and initiates corrective behavior so as to achieve more optimal results. The spindle cells are a phylogenetically recent specialization in hominoids that relay information from area 24 to other parts of the brain during focused problem solving.
We believe that the spindle cells may be co-ordinating the activity of other brain areas during intense mental activity. Based on our examination of the ontogenetic series of human brains at the National Museum of Health and Science, the spindle cells are not discernable at birth, but rather appear to migrate into anterior cingulate cortex beginning about 4 months after birth. The emergence of the spindle cells in four month old human infants coincides with the infant's capacity to hold its head steady, track a object visually and reach for that object. The late development of the spindle cells could be important since there is evidence that other populations of post-natally generated neurons are heavily influenced by environmental factors. For example, the post-natally generated neurons in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus are very vulnerable to many stress-related events and their survival can be enhanced by enriched environments, physical activity and serotonin. If the survival of the spindle cells were similarly influenced by environmental conditions during infancy, it is conceivable that the resulting changes in circuitry could either enhance or degrade mental functioning as exemplified in problem-solving ability or vulnerability to psychiatric or learning disorders.
I suspect your reaction wouldn't be as sarcastic if you were quadriplegic.
First off, it's the University of Pittsburgh, not Pittsburgh University.
The actual web site for Schwartz's lab:
http://motorlab.neurobio.pitt.edu/
The above link has neat videos of the monkey moving the arm around.
Researchers like Schwartz who record from motor areas of the brain do cool stuff, but I'm personally more interested in folks like the Andersen Lab who do recording from more goal-oriented areas. Basically, it's a difference between a command to "move my elbow this much" versus "I want to grab this object."
Here's a PDF link to a paper published by Schwartz and others in 2002. Here's the abstract:
Direct Cortical Control of 3D Neuroprosthetic Devices
Dawn M. Taylor, Stephen I. Helms Tillery, Andrew B. Schwartz
Three-dimensional (3D) movement of neuroprosthetic devices can be controlled by the activity of cortical neurons when appropriate algorithms are used to decode intended movement in real time. Previous studies assumed that neurons maintain fixed tuning properties, and the studies used subjects who were unaware of the movements predicted by their recorded units. In this study, subjects had real-time visual feedback of their brain-controlled trajectories. Cell tuning properties changed when used for brain-controlled movements. By using control algorithms that track these changes, subjects made long sequences of 3D movements using far fewer cortical units than expected. Daily practice improved movement accuracy and the directional tuning of these units.
For those of you looking for more details, here's the research paper published in Science (may need institutional subscription) and videos of all three robots.
Here's the abstract text:
Efficient Bipedal Robots Based on Passive-Dynamic Walkers
Steve Collins, Andy Ruina, Russ Tedrake, Martijn Wisse
Passive-dynamic walkers are simple mechanical devices, composed of solid parts connected by joints, that walk stably down a slope. They have no motors or controllers, yet can have remarkably humanlike motions. This suggests that these machines are useful models of human locomotion; however, they cannot walk on level ground. Here we present three robots based on passive-dynamics, with small active power sources substituted for gravity, which can walk on level ground. These robots use less control and less energy than other powered robots, yet walk more naturally, further suggesting the importance of passive-dynamics in human locomotion.
What kind of money are we talking about here? I'm guessing maybe $100 billion total, from development to prototype to working cargo-hauler.
Coincidentally, that's also about how much the International Space Station has cost.
Last year Aviation Week & Space Technology had a detailed article on Bigelow Aerospace. I don't believe I've ever heard somebody refer to them as a pulp rag by any means.