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At Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, they've cracked the retina neural code in a mouse and monkey, restoring near-normal sight. They want to move to humans next.

Canadian scientist, Chris Eliasmith of University of Waterloo in Canada, created a functioning virtual brain, Spaun. Unlike other virtual brains, Span is designed to mimic the cellular structure of the brain. As a result it can decide when to shift from one task to another, responding to eight types of requests. It also has similar brain weaknesses of humans.

American scientists of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine have made a 3d tissue printer, which prints cartage (edit:) cartilage. After printing, the printed tissue is surgically inserted and integrates itself, developing "real properties of cartilage".


next tl;dr: http://descentbb.net/viewtopic.php?f=20 ... 76#p317876

so when can I build my new enhanced body and transfer my consciousness to it?

Cool stuff. Especially that second one

Isaac wrote:At Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, they've cracked the retina neural code in a mouse and monkey, restoring near-normal sight. They want to move to humans next.

http://www.nature.com/news/prosthetic-r ... ce-1.11164
oh WOW

i pricked up my ears when you said "neural code" that, but figured it was just an exaggeration. But they wern't kidding. They are literally replacing some neural computation normally done in the back of the retina, with some computer algorithms which produce the same effect. So they can now bypass these original neurons completely. This gives them a nice development path, they can just travel further and further up the optic nerve, gradually figuring out howto replace more and more of it with computer algorithms, and keep going into the brain until they can replace (and more importantly: manipulate and AUGMENT) the entire visual cortex, and even spacial. It could be a research pathway for allowing us to use new inhuman senses, like echo-location, radar, the ability to see much more of the electromagnetic spectrum (without it changing our existing perception of currently visible colours), or being able to integrate information from more than just 2 eyes (omnidirectional awareness would be nice).

Sheila Nirenberg, a physiologist at the Weill Medical College at Cornell University in New York thinks that the problem is at least partially down to coding. Even though the retina is as thin as tissue paper, it contains several layers of nerves that seem to encode light into neural signals. "The thing is, nobody knew the code," she says. Without it, Nirenberg believes that visual prostheses will never be able to create images that the brain can easily recognize.

Now, she and her student, Chethan Pandarinath, have come up with a code and developed a device that uses it to restore some sight in blind mice.

There's so much of perception (PSYCH 2200, term 1 ) that isn't understood enough to build a complete model on any level, let alone the neural level of the brain, I can't see that happening very soon. Even depth perception in vision, as of this time last year (the last time I took a course directly related to it) hasn't been understood past the level of "we have binocular vision and that helps somehow". There are plenty of idioms for it but all of them have their own problems and most of them couldn't be combined.
The retinal code is extremely simple, compared to the higher-level processing that happens afterward.
Still the possibilities for actually "curing" people of blindness are overwhelming. Though people who are born blind, or have been blind for a very long time, may have more problems after gaining their sight than they did before... there are so many processes our brains do automatically that we take for granted that the brains of these people never learned; or haven't used for such a long time that they've been replaced with other information.
But this is why it's so exciting to be majoring in perception... maybe someday in my lifetime I'll be able to experience the world in all the different ways I want to.

If not, then having just one life as just one creature is not fair...

can you explain more Alter? IMHO computers interpret stereo vision pretty well.
ie:
[youtube]HqIFCnb63jo[/youtube] [youtube]SQx5vU8BA-M[/youtube]

and all that without the movement (and central vision resolution) advantages of an actual eye. If we added those sorts of advantages things get scary pretty fast aaahhhhh

[youtube]Er5qRyz4NV0[/youtube] [youtube]6hLiQQaUnGM[/youtube]

When I have some time I'll dig out my textbook from last year and summarize.
Right now I'm focusing on studying for my current psych exam.