DailyDirt: Augmenting Animals

Bleeding Edge

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There are a bunch of people out there who are into turning themselves into cyborgs or adding to their natural-born abilities. Some of them say they’re transhumanists, but others are just super geeks willing to experiment on themselves for fun. (Most folks are probably willing to wait a bit to make sure brain implants are actually safe.) Here are just a few projects that are working on giving lab rats some cool new upgrades.

• Rats have been given an artificial sense — the ability to detect infrared light. An IR sensor was attached to the rat’s head and after a month of training, the animal could reliably sense when researchers directed otherwise invisible IR beams of light on it. [url]
• Some neuroengineers have developed a fully implantable and wirelessly rechargeable brain device that could serve as a brain-computer interface. This implant has lasted for over a year in lab animals, and it can observe, record and process information directly from dozens of brain neurons. [url]
• Rat brains on two separate continents have been connected to work in tandem. The researchers are already working on connecting the brains of four rats at the same time, as well as starting on brains of larger mammals…. (insert ominous music here) [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: bci, biology, biotech, brain implants, brains, hmi, infrared light, neuroengineers, transhumanism