Your doctor was right in advising to exercise. And it seems, a low calorie diet too are beneficial on mental acuity and motor ability - that is if you are a mouse. Researchers show in mice that caloric restriction and exercise delay some of the debilitating effects of aging by rejuvenating connections between nerves and the muscles that they control (harvardmagazine.com).
MP3-encoding reduces efficiently the size of an audio file while still reproducing the quality of the original by reducing accuracy of certain parts of sound that are considered to be beyond the auditory resolution ability of most people. The brain uses the same trick. It takes advantage of the fact that the world is predictable, and pays less attention to parts it can predict. More on how the brain behaves like the MP3-encoder on pnas.org and dailyscience.com.
Find out if you are ultimately intelligent and take the online test. The “ultimate intelligence test” claims to cover the broadest range of cognitive skills that are believed to contribute to intelligence. The test is divided into 12 tasks that are designed to test 12 different aspects of working memory, reasoning, focus, and planning. More about the test in “How intelligent are you?” (smh.com.au).
Henry Markram is not the only one who aims to understand the the brain. Gero Miesenboeck records the activity of each neuron to figure out what they do. Watch the video below or read about Optogenetics: Controlling the Brain with Light (scientificamerican.com).
New research shows how our brains allocates attention to differen stimuli. The researchers have found that individuals can exert conscious control over the firing of these single neuron and, in doing so, manipulate the behavior of an image on a computer screen (brain-controlled robots of last weeks post are not so far away then). Read and watch the embedded video how the volunteers chose between the images on a computer screen by altering their thoughts (via discovermagazine.com)
Do you remember Kevin Warwick, Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading and incidentally also the world’s first cyborg? He is best known for his studies on direct brain-computer-interfaces. Watch the video, in which Warwick discusses a brain-controlled robot and the research findings (via itn.co.uk).
After driverless cars a singing robot made her debut at the Digital Content Expo in Tokyo. The robot learns by mimicking a real human singer. “Diva-bot” listens to the tune and watches the singer’s lips as she performs. Then the robot re-creates its own rendition, using software named VocalListener to synthesize its own vocal sound. The technology is even able to model the singer’s breathing movements and synthesize the sounds of breathing.
Remember our in story in April about how fully autonomous self-driving cars are not so far away? Now a team of researchers at the TU Braunschweig has realized automatic driving in real city traffic. “Leonie” is a VW Passat station wagon and can autonomously detect traffic lights, junctions including the rights of way, naturally other cars, cyclists and pedestrians. View the video (golem.de, in german).
Why a machine that daydreams? Computer scientist Graham Mann argues that machines will not be truly intelligent until they can also experience emotion.
Mann is not the only person working on this. There is already the so-calledd Emotion Markup Language (read EmotionML: Will computers tap into your feelings?, cnet.com)
(via itnews.com.au)
In the movie Inception people could enter into the dreams of other people. However, science is not so far from this Science Fiction. Researchers have developed the Sleep Waking robot that plays back your dreams - that is play back your movements when you dream. The researchers collect EEG, EKG, REM data of the dreamer. A machine learning algorithm identifies the patterns which is used to animate the robot. Watch the video or read more (livescience.com).
