What happens when thousands of rat cells are kept in a petri dish? It learns to fly a jet plane. I am not out of mind as I write this, this may sound as piece of sci-fi but this is what exactly 37 year old, Thomas DeMarse, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Florida has done, growing a new breed of human computers.
Over 25,000 cells collected from a rat embryo, suspended in a special liquid to keep them alive and then laid across 60 electrodes, which measured only about an inch across. A look through the microscope unveils what can be called a ‘live computation device’. A work well received by leading US academics and scientific journals, gives a deep insight into the working of a brain. How it processes, transforms and stores information.
On linking the brain to a jet stimulator, manipulated by electrodes and desktop computer, the results were striking. The brain learns how to fly an F-22 jet plane on a stimulator in conditions as adverse as mock hurricane strength winds.
As DeMarse himself explains, ‘Initially when we hook up this brain to a flight simulator, it doesn’t know how to control the aircraft. So you hook it up and the aircraft simply drifts randomly. And as the data comes in, it slowly modifies the (neural) network so over time, the network gradually learns to fly the aircraft.’
The research is being considered to be a breakthrough and could be used to fly planes and sent on missions who are considered too dangerous for humans. In other cases this is research may help study neural behaviour in a network and help neural disorders and neural computing.
Via: Pantherhouse
