Technology: Science news of the year, 2008

Monkey brain moves arm
Technology could lead to better prostheses

Macaque monkeys with electrodes implanted in their brains learned to control a robotic arm with their thoughts. After practice, the monkeys appeared to treat the robotic arm as their own and could feed themselves with the arm using fluid motions.

“The thing that struck me was how naturally the animals interacted with the device,” comments John Kalaska of the University of Montreal (SN: 6/21/08, p. 9). A computer interpreted the electrical activity of muscle-control neurons in the monkeys’ brains that normally move the monkeys’ arms. Based on these electrical patterns, the computer deciphered the movements that the monkeys intended to make with their own arms, which were restrained, and used that information to operate the robotic arm. Similar experiments wired a paralyzed monkey’s brain to the animal’s forearm muscles, enabling the monkey to make simple forearm movements (SN Online: 10/15/08).

In past research, electrodes implanted into the brains of animals or humans lost contact with the nerve cells after months or weeks because cells in the brain treated the electrodes as foreign objects and attacked them. These obstacles would have to be overcome before thought-controlled robotic limbs would be feasible for people, Kalaska says.

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High-tech fingerprints  A new chemical technique could detect traces of explosives, illicit drugs (cocaine shown) and other compounds from fingerprints. It could also reveal signs of disease (SN: 8/30/08, p. 9).

Charging up  By using an electric field to make diesel slightly thinner, researchers improve the fuel efficiency of a car by more than 18 percent. Real-world improvements would probably be less, around 5 to 10 percent (SN: 10/25/08, p. 9).

Nanocrystal self-assembly  Scientists use DNA as a sort of Velcro to create what may be the first nanomaterials that assemble themselves into 3-D structures, which may lead to crystals with new properties (SN: 2/16/08, p. 110).

Tackling cancer  New cancer therapies that use tiny magnets (shown in blue fluid) to selectively deliver heat or drugs to malignant cells (shown with tan backdrop) are in development (SN: 8/16/08, p. 5).

I, computer  Scientists engineer bacteria to act as the first living computers. The bacteria use their DNA to perform calculations to solve the “pancake flipping” problem (SN Online: 5/19/08).

Improved efficiency  A team finds a way to make the alloy bismuth antimony telluride a 15 to 30 percent more efficient conductor, which may lead to a new kind of solar panel (SN: 3/29/08, p. 206).

Goodbye transistor  A new type of electronic component that changes electrical resistance depending on past experiences, called the memristor (17 shown between platinum wires above), could make computer chips more compact and powerful (SN: 5/24/08, p. 13).

Diamonds in nano  Manipulating the quantum properties of diamond impurities could bring researchers a step closer to quantum computers and finer-scale microscopes (SN: 10/25/08, p. 9).