----- Original Message -----
From: "marika" <marik...@mail.com>
Newsgroups:
alt.td.d.bv.mde.ych.s.lrhtpdsba.ei.aazt.pmuqc.pj,alt.usenet.legends.lester-mosley
Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2007 10:23 AM
Subject: global warming deniers find comfort would be presidents dilemma
> How come when newspapers first report this stuff, they always use words
> like "amazing" and "breakthrough" and "science". Have seen it before,
> lots of times- research on paralysis, diabetes, cancer- the first news
> story always heralds these findings as "research/medical miracles". And
> then people read it and use words like "Cool!" and "Neat" and "Wow" and
> "Possible cure"..
> Then as soon as PETA gets a hold of it, you suddenly start to hear words
> like "cruel" and "torture" and "vivisection", and all the good
> possibilities- cures and milestones- all flies out the window. And
> everybody wants all the work stopped, dead in its tracks. Where did all
> the "cures" and "miracles" go?
>
> Where/When exactly is the turning point for these stories?
>
>
>> > By BBC News Online Science Editor Dr David Whitehouse
>> >
>> > In what is bound to become a much debated and highly controversial
> experiment,
>> > a team of US scientists have wired a computer to a cat's brain and
>> > created
>> > videos of what the animal was seeing.
>> >
>> > According to a paper published in the Journal of Neuroscience, Yang
> Dan, Garret
>> > Stanley and Fei Li of the University of California at Berkeley have
> been able
>> > to "reconstruct natural scenes with recognizable moving objects."
>> >
>> > The researchers attached electrodes to 177 cells in the so-called
>> > thalamus
>> > region of the cat's brain and monitored their activity.
>> >
>> > The thalamus is connected directly to the cat's eyes via the optic
> nerve. Each
>> > of its cells is programmed to respond to certain features in the cat's
> field of
>> > view. Some cells "fire" when they record an edge in the cat's vision,
> others
>> > when they see lines at certain angles, etc. This way the cat's brain
> acquires
>> > the information it needs to reconstruct an image.
>> >
>> > The scientists recorded the patterns of firing from the cells in a
> computer.
>> > They then used a technique they describe as a "linear decoding
> technique" to
>> > reconstruct an image.
>> >
>> > To their amazement they say they saw natural scenes with recognisable
> objects
>> > such as people's faces. They had literally seen the world through cat's
> eyes.
>> >
>> > Other scientists have hailed this as an important step in our
> understanding of
>> > how signals are represented and processed in the brain.
>> >
>> > It is research that has enormous implications.
>> >
>> > It could prove a breakthrough in the hoped-for ability to wire
> artificial limbs
>> > directly into the brain. More amazingly, it could lead to artificial
>> > brain
>> > extensions.
>> >
>> > By understanding how information can be presented to the brain, some
>> > day,
>> > scientists may be able to build devices that interface directly with
> the brain,
>> > providing access to extra data storage or processing power or the
> ability to
>> > control devices just by thinking about them.
>> >
>> > One of the scientists behind this current breakthrough, Garret Stanley,
> now
>> > working at Harvard University, has already predicted machines with
>> > brain
>> > interfaces.
>> >
>> > Such revolutionary devices should not be expected in the very near
> future. They
>> > will require decoding information from elsewhere in the brain looking
>> > at
>> > signals that are far more complicated than those decoded from the cat's
>> > thalamus but, in a way, the principle has been demonstrated.
>