NEWRON Vol V, Issue VII

[Natan Davidovics]

NeuroEngineering Weekly Review of News

Most of us have been under the impression that we are the ones doing the tunneling in our noses but new research has shown that our noses do a little but of tunneling (of the quantum variety) on their own (article #2).

-Thanks to Nasir for submitting an article this week.

 

Interesting NeuroEngineering links:

Hopkins Neuroengineering web site: http://neuroengineering.bme.jhu.edu
New job blog: http://neuroengjobs.blogspot.com/
Blog for administrative questions: http://neuroengineering.blogspot.com
NEWRON on the web!: http://neuroengineering.bme.jhu.edu/Home/newron

Enjoy,
Natan Davidovics
NEWRON Publishing Corporation

A clearer picture of vision

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/vision-coding-0128.html

At the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers’ Human Vision and Electronic Imaging conference on Jan. 27, Ruth Rosenholtz, a principal research scientist in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, presented a new mathematical model of how the brain does visual processing. Most models of human object recognition assume that the first thing the brain does with a retinal image is identify edges — boundaries between regions with different light-reflective properties — and sort them according to alignment: horizontal, vertical and diagonal. Rosenholtz has proposed that cognitive scientists instead think of the brain as collecting statistics on the features in different patches of the visual field. 

Nose Works Like a Scanning Tunneling Microscope

http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/diagnostics/nose-works-like-a-scanning-tunneling-microscope/?utm_source=techalert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=110217

Flash memory, scanning tunneling microscopes...and a fly’s sense of smell. According to new research, the same strange phenomenon—quantum tunneling—makes all three possible. If confirmed, the discovery could pave the way for a new generation of artificial scents, from perfumes to pheromones—and, perhaps someday, artificial noses. The conventional theory of smell holds that the nose’s chemical receptors—some 400 different kinds in a human nose—sense the presence of odorant molecules by a lock-and-key process that reads the odorant’s physical shape. That theory has some problems, though. For instance, ethanol (which smells like vodka) andethanethiol (which smells like rotten eggs) have essentially the same shape, differing from each other by only a single atom. 

Now, you can control computer commands by thought

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/software/now-you-can-control-computer-commands-by-thought/articleshow/7241148.cms

A new software platform, developed by French scientists , which was demonstrated at a tech fest at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) here allows individuals to control computer commands by just a 'thought'. 
Acting as an interface designed to translate what happens in the brain into a computer command, this software --'OpenViBE'-- is the outcome of a project initiated in 2005 and has a multitude of potential applications.