Brainiac + Dead Rats + Petri Dish = New, Interactive Mini-Brain

here, and here . From the first article:

A University of Florida scientist has grown a living “brain” that can fly a simulated plane, giving scientists a novel way to observe how brain cells function as a network.

The “brain” -- a collection of 25,000 living neurons, or nerve cells, taken from a rat’s brain and cultured inside a glass dish -- gives scientists a unique real-time window into the brain at the cellular level. By watching the brain cells interact, scientists hope to understand what causes neural disorders such as epilepsy and to determine noninvasive ways to intervene.
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[DeMarse's] experimental "brain" interacts with an F-22 fighter jet flight simulator through a specially designed plate called a multi-electrode array and a common desktop computer.

“It’s essentially a dish with 60 electrodes arranged in a grid at the bottom,” DeMarse said. “Over that we put the living cortical neurons from rats, which rapidly begin to reconnect themselves, forming a living neural network – a brain.”

The brain and the simulator establish a two-way connection, similar to how neurons receive and interpret signals from each other to control our bodies. By observing how the nerve cells interact with the simulator, scientists can decode how a neural network establishes connections and begins to compute, DeMarse said.

Now this is simply incredible. I didn't even know scientists could keep neurons alive in a petri dish for a decent amount of time, much less hook them up to a computer and let them learn how to fly. The brain can only control the pitch and roll of the aircraft in simulated weather ranging from perfect weather to hurricane-force winds, but that's not bad for about 25,000 neurons in a petri dish wired to a common desktop computer. Additionally, these neurons were originally inside rats, so they aren’t a particularly brilliant type. However, the neurons technically do not sit in a petri dish, they have a petri dish-like glass plate with electrodes attached to it.

The scientist hopes to “get ideas from this system about how brains compute and process information”.

According to the article, all this was done with a $500,000 grant to “create a mathematical model that reproduces how the neurons compute”.


Give a scientist $500,000, and he grows a brain that can fly a bit. Give a man $20 million, and he will build a safe, reusable spaceship. Not bad!

Unfortunately, government likes to spend money on other things, like The National Endowment for the Arts, which spent $1,500 for a poem “lighght.” That wasn’t a typo, and it’s not even the poem’s title. That is the entire poem. If I say “brighght.” to The National Endowment for the Arts, the unpronounceable quasi-word might also be worth $1,500.

Perhaps it’s time to scrap The National Endowment for the Arts and replace it with a National Endowment for the Sciences.