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Researchers partially revive pig brains four hours after 'death'
Used to be that once someone cut off your head, your life was over. That may no longer be the case. A study published in the journal Nature this week illustrates Yale researchers' successful efforts to restore and preserve the cellular function of pig brains up to four hours after their decapitation at a local slaughterhouse. Miracle Max, eat your heart out.
Spaceflight changes the shape of the human brain
The human brain reshapes itself during spaceflight, according to a study by a team of scientists from the University of Michigan. They came to that conclusion after comparing the structural MRIs of 12 astronauts who only spent a couple of weeks as ISS crew members against 14 who spent six months aboard the space station. Apparently, they saw both an increase and a decrease in gray matter in different parts of the brain, and those changes are more pronounced in the subjects who spent the most time in orbit. In short the more time you spend in space, the more gray matter gets displaced.
Rodent trials suggest screen-addiction hurts child development
A new study from the Seattle Children's Research Institute may have taken the first step towards confirming something my parents have been telling me for decades: too much TV rots your brain. Well, at least it does for mice. Scientists found that raising groups of mice in an environment designed to simulate extreme screen exposure developed behaviors similar to those found in children with ADHD -- resulting in adult mice with more memory problems and less patience.
Surprisingly efficient snail brains could help make robots smarter
How snails think about eating could inform future robot decision-making designs. University of Sussex researchers have discovered that the creatures use just two brain cells for complex decisions: one cell told the snail if it was hungry, while another told it if food was near. Scientists attached electrodes to the snails' brains to measure activity -- which hopefully looked adorable. The takeaway is that it could help design efficient robot brains using the least possible number of components yet still capable of performing complex tasks. Lead researcher Professor George Kemenes added that it: "also shows how this system helps to manage how much energy they use once they have made a decision."
ICYMI: The Martian colony plan, simulated rat brain and more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-424179{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-424179, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-424179{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-424179").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: We are rounding up Space Week with NASA's detailed plan to get earthlings to settle on Mars. Meanwhile other scientists teamed up to unravel how a rat's brain works, to then simulate it with a computer. Early testing shows how calcium affects the brain in a way that can only help with studies on neurological disorders. And Disney is jumping into more augmented reality with a coloring book app that brings creatures to life while they're worked on.
Smedley talks H1Z1's map size, population density
SOE CEO John Smedley's not done talking about zombie sandbox survival MMO H1Z1. Earlier this afternoon on Reddit, Smed posted a lengthy comment addressing questions about the game's map size. Rather than summarize it for you, I'll just go ahead and leave the whole thing here. I've seen a bunch of people asking questions about the map size. Forgelight is built to handle arbitrarily sized worlds. Our plan is simple -- we're building the core of "anywhere USA". When we first open it up to users the map will be huge, but nowhere near as big as it's going to be in short order. Our map editing system allows us to quickly add massive areas. We want to make sure we clearly understand how the players are playing the game before we do that. On PlanetSide 2 we made a mistake by making multiple continents before we had a strong enough idea of what worked and what didn't. This game is different. We're doing it smarter. When we open up the early access there will be a massive map for players to enjoy. Over time (very quickly) they'll magically just be able to keep going further than they've gone before. It's a very unique way of doing it, but we actually think this is a better way to go. So not to worry. Zombie Apocalypse isn't going to be any fun if it's like Disneyland on Spring Break and super-crowded. We want remote... haunting... being scared when you see someone. Your first instinct needs to be to hide. If there are 20 players in your view it's not a very convincing Apocalypse. So how many players per server? Who knows. As we add more land the number of people we can hold on a server goes way up. So we're excited. We have a ton of zombies for you to fight too. You'll be seeing hordes, oh yes you will.
Researchers link brains, control each other's actions via the internet (video)
Human brain-to-brain interfacing seems like the stuff of fiction (Pacific Rim, anyone?), but researchers at the University of Washington have made it a reality. A team led by faculty members Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco claim to have pioneered the world's first human-to-human experiment of the sort. Rao and Stocco were placed in different buildings and hooked up to two devices to record, interpret and send their brain signals via the internet. The sender (Rao) wore an EEG machine while the receiver (Stocco) was connected to a transcranial magnetic stimulation coil. The experiment was performed with a simple arcade-style video game, the objective of which was to shoot baddies out of the sky. Rao watched the screen and visualized lifting his hand to press the space bar to fire, but Stocco was the trigger man. Clear across campus, Stocco's finger tapped the space bar at the appropriate time, eliminating the target, despite being unable to hear or see the game's display. To learn more, check out the video after the break or the source link below.
EEG headware probes your neurons, shows interrogators your cranial contact list
You might pride yourself on your poker face, but there would be no way to hide from a skull-probing EEG helmet being developed by Veritas Scientific. The device takes advantage of a well-known medical response called P300, which causes your brain's voltage to drop a split-second after you put a name to a face or object. Simply by showing you a slideshow of different images, interrogators could tell whether or not you recognize a particular individual -- or maybe that LTE-connected railgun hidden in your trunk. The company is pursuing military contracts and hopes to have a prototype ready in time for this year's war game exercises, but meanwhile you might want to start thinking of a way to install that tinfoil hat inside your skull.
British researchers design a million-chip neural network 1/100 as complex as your brain
If you want some idea of the complexity of the human brain, consider this: a group of British universities plans to link as many as a million ARM processors in order to simulate just a small fraction of it. The resulting model, called SpiNNaker (Spiking Neural Network architecture), will represent less than one percent of a human's gray matter, which contains 100 billion neurons. (Take that, mice brains!) Yet even this small scale representation, researchers believe, will yield insight into how the brain functions, perhaps enabling new treatments for cognitive disorders, similar to previous models that increased our understanding of schizophrenia. As these neural networks increase in complexity, they come closer to mimicking human brains -- perhaps even developing the ability to make their own Skynet references.
Poker chip-sized device non-invasively measures brain temperature, intrigues Le Chiffre
Do you ever feel like Portal 2 is making your brain overheat? You should get that checked, and thanks to researchers in Norfolk, Virginia, there's an easier way to do so. The Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters has developed a device the diameter of a poker chip that sits atop a patient's head; by detecting the microwaves that all human tissues produce, it calculates brain temperature without the need for messy skull-popping. The waves pass through the bone to give doctors precise, up-to-the-minute results, which can help prevent brain damage due to overheating. One possible use for the technology is helping hypoxic (oxygen lacking) infants, who can be treated with cooling therapies. Of course, you can probably make do with that old home remedy: just put a bag of frozen carrots on your head next time GlaDOS has you stumped.
GDC 2011: Jeff Strain lets us eat... err... pick his brains on Undead Labs' upcoming zombie MMO
The team at Undead Labs has big plans for the studio's first two projects currently under development: Class 3 and Class 4. So far, we know that Class 3 will be a non-MMO console zombie shoot-em-up game developed for Xbox Live, and Class 4 is intended to be the game that crosses into a massively online world. That's why we were glad to sit down with Jeff Strain, founder of Undead Labs, to hear more details on the studio's gory game goodness, which is surely lurking and primed to pounce on us and eat our brains -- or at least some of our gaming time. Are you hungry for all the meaty details of this ambitious console horror game? Join us behind the break for more!
Research suggests that your body knows you made a typo when your conscious mind simply can't be bothered
This may or may not come as a shocker to you -- but when you make a typo, your body can tell, according to a new study at Vanderbilt University. The study monitored a group of people who could type at least 40 WPM consistently as they transcribed copy. In analyzing the typists' key strokes, researchers found that interestingly, even if a typist's mistake was immediately 'silently' corrected onscreen by those running the study, the typist's fingers fumbled or paused, signaling an 'awareness' that a mistake had been made. Essentially, this means that while the conscious mind may not know that a mistake has been made (especially if there's no visual evidence of it), the part of the brain that controls the fingers typing movements have some awareness of the mistakes. For those of us who spend our lives banging away at a keyboard, these preliminary results won't really come as any surprise -- the feeling of having made a mistake is pretty instinctual. Regardless, the results suggest a hierarchical manner of mistake detection in humans, the "lower" more instinctual part of the brain recognizing and correcting the mistake, while the conscious part of the brain assigns credit and blame. Now if we could just figure out what part of our brain is responsible for relentlessly pointing out others' typos, we'd be set.
Gamers make accurate decisions faster than non-gamers, new study finds
Many studies have shown some evidence that spending a lot of time playing video games can mean, for instance, that a person will perform worse in school -- probably because they're too busy playing The Sims to study. Recently, however, some newer studies have begun to show some more complicated evidence. A new study published in Current Biology, for instance, discusses players of standard action games, and how doing so augments their decision making abilities. What gaming does, according to the study's perspective, is help people make probabilistic inferences -- decisions based on incomplete information -- increasing the efficiency of determining odds of something happening or not. The study examined both gamers and non-gamers, and found that given the same rate of accuracy, the gamers would consistently make decisions faster than the non-gamers. The entire article can be found at the source link -- but for now, just take comfort in the knowledge that in some ways, playing video games is making you smarter.
Capcom shambles to the Toronto Zombie Walk
First: Toronto has an annual Zombie Walk? How cool is that? Anyhway, in order to promote Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles, Capcom will have a presence at this year's brain-munching jamboree, which takes place on Saturday, October 24. The company will have a tent at the event, giving people free zombie makeovers. We presume Capcom will do this with makeup and not by doling out actual zombie bites. Capcom has also sponsored a series of rather disturbing ads for the event, one of which you will find after the break. Warning: It's gross.
This is your brain on PvP
Ars Technica has news of a new study that isn't directly World of Warcraft-related, but that does have some pretty obvious applications in Azeroth. By studying the way we play when we believe we're competing against a human and a computer opponent (PvP vs. PvE, in WoW terms), scientists have determined that different parts of the brain are more active when we think we're playing against a human opponent. They call this extra activity "mind-reading," but it's not that supernatural: when we think we're playing a human, we try to put ourselves in their place, and think what they're thinking.It gets deeper: they even throw gender into the mix, and discovered that male brains seem to be working harder to do this kind of "mind-reading" of the other side. Their conclusion says that that's because women are naturally more empathetic, and thus don't have to work as hard to figure out what another person is thinking. That seems a little general -- it could also mean that the males care more about competition, and thus are working harder to "mind-read," or it could even just be a wrinkle of the way this data was gathered. More research is probably needed on that one -- if women are so great at figuring out their opponents, why aren't we seeing all-female teams winning Arena tournaments?It would be interesting to know, too, whether there's increased activity in other areas, say pattern recognition or cause-effect centers of the brain, when we're playing against opponents that we know are computers. But this does tell us that there are definitely different skillsets at work when playing PvP or PvE, and why some people might very clearly enjoy one over the other.
Left 4 Dead pre-orders to grant early demo access
Though we'd normally exhibit moderate hesitation before hurling ourselves and our easily gnawed-off limbs into a zombie apocalypse, Valve's cooperative multiplayer shooter, Left 4 Dead, demands a more impetuous reaction. Those looking to mow down monsters and make the undead deader would do well to pre-order the game, either on Steam or at "participating retailers," and net themselves early access to a demo. "Early access" translates to November 6th for both the Xbox 360 and PC demos, which feature single-player and co-op modes for one to four players. Skeptical folk will have to wait for a general release on the 11th, or the full game's North American debut on November 18th.[Via press release]
Zombie infection down to 1 minute
This just in... you now become a zombie after only one minute.After you kill a zombie infect player, creature, or NPC you'll become infected the plague that turns you into zombie. This plague now only takes one minute to increase your brain eating needs to epic levels.Does this mean phase five is about to being? Update: Yes, it appears phase 5 is beginning.We can't tell just yet, but we're all on the lookout for it. Phase 4 has brought lots of new rewards, events, and other fun things. Keep your eyes peeled, and if you see anything drop us a tip on our tip line! Update: Almost all Argent Dawn Healers are gone. The only ones in IF I was able to find were near the flight path and the King's room.WoW Insider likes us some braaaains!Thanks to the many people who sent this in!
Phase 4 of the Zombie invasion begins! [UPDATED x8]
The zombie invasion has hit phase four. We can see that the scourge are full out attacking cities now, and the plague debuff will now turn you into a Zombie after a short period of 2 minutes. There are necropolis appearing all over Azeroth.Argent Dawn representatives are being spotted around capital cities. The new raid boss in Karazhan, Tenris Mirkblood, is now active and dropping one Arcanite Ripper (a 2H axe), a Vampiric Batling for each raid member, and two badges for each raid member. You can get to him by going through Attuneman, clearing him, and then moving up the stairs behind his room. We've got a strategy guide up now with details on how to defeat himYou can see the location of the necropolises on the world map - they are indicated by little purple skull icons.A Haunted Momento has been confirmed to drop from rare spawns around the necropolises- it's a leather ball type item that you throw to someone. Whoever has the momento gets to have a wraith follow you around! Pics after the break and in our gallery.Big Update: Click the Arcanite Ripper and play it like a guitar!Late night updates: There are Argent Dawn healers appearing at most flight paths (if not all) around the game. They are making is so the flight path NPC does not become a zombie anymore. We have a semi-confirmation of the Lurch buff increasing in speed to 125%. But we also have conflicting reports.Continue reading after the break for the latest information. %Gallery-35353% Zombies have entered the World of Warcraft in the Wrath of the Lich King world event! Check out our tips for eating brains, our zombie night gallery, or see Blizzard's official zombie infestation guide. They live! Braaiiiiinnnssss!
Tips for eating brains
I had a ton of fun on the servers last night running around and eating as many brains as I can. As I'm a huge fan of zombies in all their forms, Blizzard's world event hit the mark for me, and so, I've spent my every minute as a zombie plotting how the living undead just might take over the world. Here's a few tips for making sure the zombie apocalypse really does shake the world.Strength in numbers: This one's obvious by now, but you need to be with other zombies to really do any damage. You can convert NPCs, but not very quickly unless they're low level, and low level zombies drop relatively fast. It's far better to convert players (usually by listening in for anyone who wants to be a zombie, and then inviting them to a zombie party off the beaten path). But the key is to wait until you've got a good group -- any zombies that go shambling off by themselves are going to get quickly overtaken by NPC guards or overzealous Paladins.More tips after the break.
Dead Rising to eat brains of Wii gamers
The adventures of photojournalist Frank West have taken him into one of the darkest, filthiest, most vile and disgusting cesspools of scum and villainy in human history -- the Xbox 360 (zzzzzing!). Now it appears he is branching out to the sunny shores of Nintendo, as Dead Rising for the Wii has been revealed in the latest Famitsu! Happy day for humans, bad day for zombies.Dead Rising was Capcom's fresh foray into the survival horror genre, after spending years on the same Resident Evil formula. It was critically acclaimed and a blast to play, despite being criticized for awkward saving mechanics and time constraints. Based on the success of RE4: Wii Edition, Capcom went ahead and pulled Dead Rising up from the grave. And we're glad they did.According to some brief translations, new content in the Wii port includes extra weapons, a brand new (undoubtedly psychotic) boss and motion-controlled attacks. The graphics will look as close as possible to the 360 version, and the gameplay purportedly takes into consideration the needs of casual players. Could this mean a more streamlined save system for ease of use? Possibly.Enter here (if you dare) for the full range of Dead Rising scans.
