>Does the Earth’s magnetic field cause suicides?

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Many animals can sense the Earth’s magnetic field, so why not people, asks Oleg Shumilov of the Institute of North Industrial Ecology Problems in Russia.

Shumilov looked at activity in the Earth’s geomagnetic field from 1948 to 1997 and found that it grouped into three seasonal peaks every year: one from March to May, another in July and the last in October.

Surprisingly, he also found that the geomagnetism peaks matched up with peaks in the number of suicides in the northern Russian city of Kirovsk over the same period.

Shumilov acknowledges that a correlation like this does not necessarily mean there is a causal link, but he points out that there have been several other studies suggesting a link between human health and geomagnetism.

For example, a 2006 review of research on cardiovascular health and disturbances in the geomagnetic field in the journal Surveys in Geophysics (DOI: 10.1007/s10712-006-9010-7) concluded that a link was possible and that the effects seemed to be more pronounced at high latitudes.

Twinned peaks

The review’s author, Michael Rycroft, formerly head of the European Geosciences Society, says that geomagnetic health problems affect 10 to 15% of the population.

“Others have found similar things [to Shumilov’s results] in independent sets of data,” says Rycroft. “It suggests something may be linking the two factors.”

A 2006 Australian study, for example, also found a correlation between peaks in suicide numbers and geomagnetic activity (Bioelectromagnetics, vol. 27 p 155).

Brain storms

Psychiatrists too have noticed a correlation between geomagnetic activity and suicide rates. A review of 13 years of South African data on suicides and magnetic storms in South African Psychiatry Review, vol. 6 p. 24) suggested a link.

Geomagnetic storms – periods of high geomagnetic activity caused by large solar flares – have also been linked to clinical depression.

In 1994, a study was published suggesting a 36.2% increase in the number of men admitted into hospital for depression in the second week after geomagnetic storms (British Journal of Psychiatry vol 164, p 403).

What may be the cause of the link, if there is one, remains unknown. “The intriguing correlation between geomagnetism and suicide justifies more research into its mechanism,” says Rycroft.

Environmental cue?

“The most plausible explanation for the association between geomagnetic activity and depression and suicide is that geomagnetic storms can desynchronise circadian rhythms and melatonin production,” says Kelly Posner, a psychiatrist at Columbia University in the US.

The pineal gland, which regulates circadian rhythm and melatonin production, is sensitive to magnetic fields. “The circadian regulatory system depends upon repeated environmental cues to [synchronise] internal clocks,” says Posner. “Magnetic fields may be one of these environmental cues.”

Geomagnetic storms could disrupt body clocks, precipitating seasonal affective disorder and therefore increase suicide risk, Posner told New Scientist.

There seems little doubt that the brain responds to electromagnetic fields – coils that generate electromagnetic fields can trigger muscular twitches when placed over a person’s skull.

However, Shumilov, who was presenting his data at the European Geoscience Union (EGU) annual meeting in Vienna, Austria, last week, does not believe geomagnetic activity influences everyone equally.

Suicide statistics

He also presented hospital data from 6000 pregnant women who had routine scans of their fetus’s heart rates between 1995 and 2003. In 15% of the fetuses, periods of disturbances in their heart rates coincided with periods of high geomagnetic activity.

Shumilov accepts that light levels in northern countries can influence depression, but believes that geomagnetism may be another factor, and one that is under-appreciated.

The trouble with studying the causes of suicide is that it is a rare condition, says Klaus Ebmeier, a psychiatrist at the University of Oxford. “You are bound to get spurious effects. A study of the causes would have to enrol a country’s entire population.”

Cosmo Hallstrom, a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, agrees. “You have to be very careful with suicide statistics,” he says. “Countries report them differently. Catholic countries are very reluctant to diagnose suicide. Scandinavian countries consider it a social injustice not to.” – ns

>Woman Fights To Keep Nearly 150 Cats At Home

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A Central Florida woman fined $150 a day for having nearly 150 cats at her home was in court Wednesday fighting to keep the animals in her so-called animal sanctuary. Kristy Grant has cared for the cats at her home in Volusia County despite being cited and complaints from her neighbors. The county fined Grant $6,700 for unlicensed cats and $150 a day since March for having the cats, Local 6 reported.

“It is frustrating, it is nerve-racking,” Grant said. “It has been a long two years since I was first cited for having more than four pets on my property.”Wednesday, Grant’s attorney said Volusia County is in the dark when it comes to rules for cat hobbyist.Grant said she has recently installed a fence to keep her neighbors happy.”I guarantee that the cats can’t get out,” Grant said.During a hearing, Volusia County’s attorney said rules for keeping cats on property have not been defined, Local 6’s Chris Trenkmann said.Grant said she hopes she is not the target for a new ordinance.”Yes, that upsets me,” Grant said. “I don’t want to prevent anyone from doing what I do. If you want to help an animal, you should.”A judge said Wednesday that he will make a ruling on case at a later date.However, he pointed out to Volusia County that it did not make sense for them to be determining rules about giving permits for cat sanctuaries if they haven’t written any rules out, Trenkmann said.Grant said she has the right to have a permit to keep her cats safe. – local6

>Girl’s suicide leaves dozens ill from fumes

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A 14-year-old Japanese girl killed herself by mixing laundry detergent with cleanser, releasing fumes that also sickened 90 people in her apartment house, police said Thursday as they grappled with a spate of similar suicides.

None of the sickened neighbors in Konan, southern Japan, was severely ill, although about 10 were hospitalized, authorities said. The deadly hydrogen sulfide gas escaped from the girl’s bathroom window and entered neighboring apartments.

The girl’s suicide Wednesday night was part of an expanding string of similar deaths that experts say have been encouraged by Internet suicide sites since last summer.

A 31-year-old man outside Tokyo killed himself inside a car early Thursday by mixing detergent and bath salts, police said.

These gas mask people are one of the last things you’d want to see walking up to your house.

A local police spokesman refused to give further details, but Kyodo News agency reported that the man put a sign reading “Stay Away” on the car window.

At a business hotel in Shiga prefecture in western Japan, a man in his 30s was found dead Thursday morning by employees who noticed a strange smell coming from his room, according to national broadcaster NHK. Shiga police said officials are investigating the incident as a case of suicide by hydrogen sulfide gas but could not elaborate.

Reports of another similar death emerged Thusday afternoon when the body of a 42-year-old woman in Nagoya, central Japan, was found in a bathtub. According to Kyodo, there was toilet cleaner and bath powder nearby, along with a sign outside that read, “Poisonous gas being emitted. Caution.”

Nagoya police said they could not comment on the case, but Kyodo said that fire officials called to the scene did not detect hydrogen sulfide gas.

The method has alarmed officials because of the danger that bystanders can be hurt.

“It’s easy, and everyone can do it,” said Yasuaki Shimizu, director of Lifelink, a Tokyo-based group specializing in halting suicides. “Also, there is a lot of information teaching people how to do it on the Internet.”

Police say they have not tallied the number of detergent-related suicides, but media reports suggest that it has reached about 30 this year, including several cases in which others were also sickened.

The 14-year-old girl, whose name was not released by police, followed the pattern of other deaths.

She mixed detergent with a liquid cleanser in her bathroom, police said. The door was closed, and she had affixed a sign on the outside warning, “Gas being emitted,” Kyodo reported.

Most of those sickened nearby complained of sore throats, and about 30 people were evacuated to a nearby gymnasium.

Hydrogen sulfide gas is colorless and characterized by an odor similar to that of rotten eggs. When inhaled, it can lead to suffocation or brain damage.

Japan’s government has long battled to contain the country’s alarmingly high suicide rate. A total of 32,155 people killed themselves in 2006, giving the country the ninth highest rate in the world, according to the government.

Suicides first passed the 30,000 mark in 1998, near the height of an economic slump that left many bankrupt, jobless and desperate.

The government has earmarked 22.5 billion yen ($220 million) for anti-suicide programs to help those with depression and other mental conditions.

Last year it set a goal of cutting the suicide rate by 20 percent in 10 years through steps such as reducing unemployment, boosting workplace counseling and filtering Web sites that promote suicide. – cnn

>Church custodian on trial in Italy for weeping statue hoax

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Rome, Apr 23, 2008 / 06:36 am (CNA).- A former church custodian accused of faking an incident where a Virgin Mary statue wept blood was put on trial in the northern Italian city of Forli’ on Friday, ANSA reports.

Police accuse Vincenzo Di Costanzo of dripping his own blood onto the face of the statue in Forli’s Santa Lucia Church in a March 2006 attempt to simulate a miracle.

Forensic experts who examined the blood found the DNA matched that of a saliva sample taken from Di Costanzo.

“This is a case of high sacrilege,” said the public prosecutor Alessandro Mancini, according to ANSA.

The ex-custodian denies the charges.

Two years ago, a group of elderly women worshippers noticed that red tear-like drops had appeared on the face of a 1.2 meter-tall statue of the Madonna. People flocked to the church to see the statue, whose face looks upward to heaven with its hands drawn together in prayer.

The local bishop, when informed of the alleged miracle, removed the statue to his offices and called police. The statue did not weep again after being moved.

With the growing number in recent years of reported cases of Madonna statues moving or weeping, the Church has become very cautious about approving such cases.

In 1995, thousands flocked to a family garden in the town of Civitavecchia to see a Madonna statue that appeared to weep blood. The local bishop said that he himself had seen it weep. The blood on the statue was later found to be male. The statue’s owner, Fabio Gregori, refused to take a DNA test.

After the Civitavecchia case, dozens of reputedly miraculous statues were reported. Almost all were shown to be hoaxes, where blood, red paint, or water was splashed on the faces of the statues.

In the 1950s, a weeping Madonna in a Sicilian house was deemed a miracle. Pope John Paul II dedicated a shrine devoted to the apparition in 1994. –catnews

>Bill C-51 will

>Via email from “David with Canadian Rights and Freedoms Advocates”. Two of the links in the email were bad, but the link to the bill is real. I haven’t had time to read the bill to see if it seems to really do what is claimed below.

Bill C-51 will:

* Remove democratic oversight, bypassing elected officials to vote in laws and allow bureaucrats to adopt laws from other countries without our consent.

* Remove 70% of Natural Health Products from Canadians and many others will be available by prescription only.

* Restrict research and development of safe natural alternatives in favor of high risk drugs.

* Punish Canadians with little or no opportunity for protection or recourse for simply speaking about or giving a natural product without the approval of government. More than 70% of people in Canada use a Natural Health Product. The new law goes so far as to warrant action against a person who would give another person an unapproved amount of garlic on the recommendation that it would improve that personâ’s health.

Proposed New Enforcement Powers:

* Inspectors will enter private property without a warrant

* Inspectors will take your property at their discretion

* Inspectors will dispose of your property at will

* Inspectors will not reimburse you for your losses

* Inspectors will seize your bank accounts

* Inspectors will charge owners shipping and storage charges for seized property

* Inspectors will be empowered to store your property indefinitely

* Inspectors will levy fines of up to $5,000,000.00 and/or seek 2 years in jail per incident

With your assets and money under their control will you be able to defend yourself in Court?

Can you trust government with this new law and enforcement power?

Would our government really ever turn this law against us? Read the following account.

Example

In 2003 Health Canada launched an attack on a group of mentally ill patients and the company who supported them naturally. They seized shipments of a safe natural therapy required by the patients and stormed the support center with 17 armed officers and agents. The company (Truehope) reported that they lost contact with more than 300 of their Canadian participants. The Canadian Mental Health Association told of suicides as a result of government action.

Health Canada then charged the not for profit company, burdening them with heavy legal costs. Truehope was found innocent by necessity and instructed by the judge to continue under legal and moral responsibility. Although the agents admitted knowing they were injuring people through their actions, they stated under oath they care only about policy and directive. And what happened to the more than 300 mentally ill Canadians that became unreachable? In the months and years following, reports of hospitalizations and suicides during the seizures have surfaced. No Health Canada agent has ever been charged.

>A Disease That Allowed Torrents of Creativity

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Image of a migraine by Anne Adams, who was drawn to structure and repetition. She had a rare disease that changes connections between parts of the brain.

If Rod Serling were alive and writing episodes for “The Twilight Zone,” odds are he would have leaped on the true story of Anne Adams, a Canadian scientist turned artist who died of a rare brain disease last year.

Trained in mathematics, chemistry and biology, Dr. Adams left her career as a teacher and bench scientist in 1986 to take care of a son who had been seriously injured in a car accident and was not expected to live. But the young man made a miraculous recovery. After seven weeks, he threw away his crutches and went back to school.

According her husband, Robert, Dr. Adams then decided to abandon science and take up art. She had dabbled with drawing when young, he said in a recent telephone interview, but now she had an intense all-or-nothing drive to paint.

“Anne spent every day from 9 to 5 in her art studio,” said Robert Adams, a retired mathematician. Early on, she painted architectural portraits of houses in the West Vancouver, British Columbia, neighborhood where they lived.

In 1994, Dr. Adams became fascinated with the music of the composer Maurice Ravel, her husband recalled. At age 53, she painted “Unravelling Bolero” a work that translated the famous musical score into visual form.

Unbeknown to her, Ravel also suffered from a brain disease whose symptoms were identical to those observed in Dr. Adams, said Dr. Bruce Miller, a neurologist and the director of the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco. Ravel composed “Bolero” in 1928, when he was 53 and began showing signs of his illness with spelling errors in musical scores and letters.

“Bolero” alternates between two main melodic themes, repeating the pair eight times over 340 bars with increasing volume and layers of instruments. At the same time, the score holds methodically to two simple, alternating staccato bass lines.

“ ‘Bolero’ is an exercise in compulsivity, structure and perseveration,” Dr. Miller said. It builds without a key change until the 326th bar. Then it accelerates into a collapsing finale.

Dr. Adams, who was also drawn to themes of repetition, painted one upright rectangular figure for each bar of “Bolero.” The figures are arranged in an orderly manner like the music, countered by a zigzag winding scheme, Dr. Miller said. The transformation of sound to visual form is clear and structured. Height corresponds to volume, shape to note quality and color to pitch. The colors remain unified until the surprise key change in bar 326 that is marked with a run of orange and pink figures that herald the conclusion.

Ravel and Dr. Adams were in the early stages of a rare disease called FTD, or frontotemporal dementia, when they were working, Ravel on “Bolero” and Dr. Adams on her painting of “Bolero,” Dr. Miller said. The disease apparently altered circuits in their brains, changing the connections between the front and back parts and resulting in a torrent of creativity.

“We used to think dementias hit the brain diffusely,” Dr. Miller said. “Nothing was anatomically specific. That is wrong. We now realize that when specific, dominant circuits are injured or disintegrate, they may release or disinhibit activity in other areas. In other words, if one part of the brain is compromised, another part can remodel and become stronger.”

Thus some patients with FTD develop artistic abilities when frontal brain areas decline and posterior regions take over, Dr. Miller said.

An article by Dr. Miller and colleagues describing how FTD can release new artistic talents was published online in December 2007 by the journal Brain. FTD refers to a group of diseases often misdiagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease, in that patients become increasingly demented, Dr. Miller said. But the course and behavioral manifestations of FTD are different.

In the most common variant, patients undergo gradual personality changes. They grow apathetic, become slovenly and typically gain 20 pounds. They behave like 3-year-olds in public, asking embarrassing questions in a loud voice. All along, they deny anything is wrong.

Two other variants of FTD involve loss of language. In one, patients have trouble finding words, Dr. Miller said. When someone says to the patients, “Pass the broccoli,” they might reply, “What is broccoli?”

In another, PPA or primary progressive aphasia, the spoken-language network disintegrates. Patients lose the ability to speak.

All three variants share the same underlying pathology. The disease, which has no cure, can progress quickly or, as in the case of Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, who announced his retirement last fall because of an FTD diagnosis, over many years.

Dr. Adams and Ravel had the PPA variant, Dr. Miller said.

From 1997 until her death 10 years later, Dr. Adams underwent periodic brain scans that gave her physicians remarkable insights to the changes in her brain.

“In 2000, she suddenly had a little trouble finding words,” her husband said. “Although she was gifted in mathematics, she could no longer add single digit numbers. She was aware of what was happening to her. She would stamp her foot in frustration.”

By then, the circuits in Dr. Adams’s brain had reorganized. Her left frontal language areas showed atrophy. Meanwhile, areas in the back of her brain on the right side, devoted to visual and spatial processing, appeared to have thickened.

When artists suffer damage to the right posterior brain, they lose the ability to be creative, Dr. Miller said. Dr. Adams’s story is the opposite. Her case and others suggest that artists in general exhibit more right posterior brain dominance. In a healthy brain, these areas help integrate multisensory perception. Colors, sounds, touch and space are intertwined in novel ways. But these posterior regions are usually inhibited by the dominant frontal cortex, he said. When they are released, creativity emerges.

Dr. Miller has witnessed FTD patients become gifted in landscape design, piano playing, painting and other creative arts as their disease progressed.

Dr. Adams continued to paint until 2004, when she could no longer hold a brush. Her art, including “An ABC Book of Invertebrates,” a rendering of the mathematical ratio pi, an image of a migraine aura and other works, is at two Web sites: members.shaw.ca/adms and memory.ucsf.edu/Art/gallery.htm.

source http://www.nytimes.com

>video of telepathic dog experiment | Dogs That Know

>There may be something going on, but this particular experiment as explained in the video doesn’t show any dog mind reading.. “Interpretation after the fact” is a major flaw which leads over and over to our own self deception. In other words, we add meaning where there is none without realizing that we are doing so. In other words, how do we know the observers of this experiment, who watched the dog after they knew when the owner was coming home, didn’t just pick the one of many behaviors the dog did on camera that matched the time the woman was heading home?

Vodpod videos no longer available. from www.dogsthatknow.com posted with vodpod

>Brazil priest carried aloft by balloons missing

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A Roman Catholic priest who floated off under hundreds of helium party balloons was missing Monday off the southern coast of Brazil. Rescuers in helicopters and small fishing boats were searching off the coast of Santa Catarina state, where pieces of balloons were found.

Rev. Adelir Antonio de Carli lifted off from the port city of Paranagua on Sunday afternoon, wearing a helmet, thermal suit and a parachute. He was reported missing about eight hours later after losing contact with port authority officials, according to the treasurer of his Sao Cristovao parish, Denise Gallas.

Gallas said by telephone that the priest wanted to break a 19-hour record for the most hours flying with balloons to raise money for a spiritual rest-stop for truckers in Paranagua, Brazil’s second-largest port for agricultural products.

Some American adventurers have used helium balloons to emulate Larry Walters — who in 1982 rose three miles above Los Angeles in a lawn chair lifted by balloons.

A video of Carli posted on the G1 Web site of Globo TV showed the smiling 41-year-old priest slipping into a flight suit, being strapped to a seat attached to a huge column green, red, white and yellow balloons, and soaring into the air to the cheers of a crowd.

According to Gallas, the priest soared to an altitude of 20,000 feet (6,000 meters) then descended to about 8,200 feet (2,500 meters) for his planned flight to the city of Dourados, 465 miles (750 kilometers) northwest of his parish. But winds pushed him in another direction, and Carli was some 30 miles (50 kilometers) off the coast when he last contacted Paranagua’s port authority, Gallas said.

Carli had a GPS device, a satellite phone, a buoyant chair and is an experienced skydiver, Gallas said. “We are absolutely confident he will be found alive and well, floating somewhere in the ocean,” she said. “He knew what he was doing and was fully prepared for any kind of mishap.” – msnbc

>Bionic eye ‘blindness cure hope’

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A ‘bionic eye’ may hold the key to returning sight to people left blind by a hereditary disease, experts believe.

A team at London’s Moorfields Eye Hospital have carried out the treatment on the UK’s first patients as part of a clinical study into the therapy.

The artificial eye, connected to a camera on a pair of glasses, has been developed by US firm Second Sight.

It said the technique may be able to restore a basic level of vision, but experts warned it was still early days.  The trial aims to help people who have been made blind through retinitis pigmentosa, a group of inherited eye diseases that affects the retina. The disease progresses over a number of years, normally after people have been diagnosed when they are children.

It is estimated between 20,000 to 25,000 are affected in the UK.

It is not known whether the treatment has helped the two patients – both men in their fifties – to see and any success is only likely to be in the form of light and dark outlines, but doctors are optimistic. Lyndon da Cruz, the eye surgeon who carried out the operations last week, said the treatment was “exciting”. “The devices were implanted successfully in both patients and they are recovering well from the operations.”

Other patients across Europe and the US have also been involved in the trial. The bionic eye, known as Argus II, works via the camera which transmits a wireless signal to an ultra-thin electronic receiver and electrode panel that are implanted in the eye and attached to the retina. The electrodes stimulate the remaining retinal nerves allowing a signal to be passed along the optic nerve to the brain. David Head, chief executive of the British Retinitis Pigmentosa Society, said: “This treatment is very exciting, but it is still early days.

“There is currently no treatment for patients so this device and research into stem cells therapies offers the best hope.” – bbc

>Ten weirdest computers

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Today’s computers use pulses of electricity and flipping magnets to manipulate and store data. But information can be processed in many other, weirder, ways…

1. Optical computing

There’s nothing weird about encoding data in light – global communications depend on optical fibre. But using light signals to actually process data and carry out computations is still not practical.

Optical computers are a worthwhile goal because using light could increase a computer’s speed and the quantity of data it can handle. But trapping, storing and manipulating light is difficult.

Research by people like Paul Braun, at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, US, is bringing us closer to this goal. He has created 3D optical waveguides out of photonic crystals that should make possible to trap light, slow it down and bend it around sharp corners, without fear of it escaping.

Meanwhile Mikhail Lukin at Harvard University has developed what is essentially an optical version of the transistor that underlies all today’s computing power. Lukin and colleagues have created a way to make a single photon from one light signal switch another light signal on and off.

2. Quantum computing

If you want to tear up all the rules of classical computing, look no further than quantum computers. Instead of using electronic bits of information that exist in either 1 or 0 states, they use quantum mechanical effects to create qubits that can be in both states at once.

Calculations show that this ability allows many parallel computations to be carried out. As the number of qubits a quantum computer increases, the data it can process increases exponentially.

That would make possible things that are unfeasible with today’s computers – such as rapidly factoring extremely large numbers to crack cryptographic keys.

However, quantum computers so far have only had very small numbers of qubits using quantum dots, nuclear magnetic resonance, metal ions, and, more recently entangled pairs of photons.

3. DNA computing

DNA may be the perfect material for carrying out computations. In a sense that is precisely what it evolved to do: DNA processes data and runs programs stored in sequences of genomic base pairs, as well as coordinating proteins that process information themselves to keep organisms alive.

The first person to co-opt these processes for computational problems was Leonard Adleman at the University of Southern California. In 1994, he used DNA to solve a well-known mathematical problem called the 7-point Hamiltonian Path problem.

Since then, DNA has also been used to create logic gates and an unbeatable tic-tac-toe opponent.

The basic principle is to use sequences of DNA to recognise shorter “input” strands, and to produce different “output” sequences. The results can then be read, for example, through the activation of fluorescent proteins.

Recently DNA-computing enthusiasts have become interested in having their creations go to work inside biological systems like the human body. It makes sense, because that’s where they fit in best – and where conventional computers fit in least.

4. Reversible computing

Some people think we should be recycling our bits as well as our trash.

Hardware companies have long tried to reduce the power consumption of computers. One unusual way to do this is by engineering chips that are “reversible”.

Normally every computational operation that involves losing a bit of information also discards the energy used to represent it. Reversible computing aims to recover and reuse this energy.

One way to do this, which is being developed by Michael Frank at the University of Florida, US, involves making versions of logic gates than can run in reverse.

Every computing operation involves feeding inputs into logic gates, which produce output signals. Instead of discarding the energy of those signals, Frank’s gates run in reverse after every operation. That returns the energy of the output signal to the start of the circuit where it is used to carry a new input signal.

It may sound odd, but according to Frank, as computing power improves it won’t be long before chips’ wastefulness will be a major limit to their performance.

5. Billiard Ball computing

Computing today involves chain reactions of electrons passing from molecule to molecule inside a circuit. So it makes sense to try and harness other kinds of chain reaction for computing – even dominoes or marbles.

Logic gates have been made by carefully arranging dominoes or chutes for marbles to roll down (video).

Basic computing circuits like half-adders can also be made.

But making something as powerful as a microprocessor this way would require acres of space – unless your balls or dominoes are very small.

Researchers at IBM have experimented with logic circuits that use cascades of atoms bouncing off each other like billiard balls to pass information along their length.

Such gates can only be used once, but could be significantly smaller than even the tiniest existing transistors.

6. Neuronal computing

Why start from scratch when you can borrow already successful ideas? Some researchers hope to get ahead by copying nature’s very own computers.

Ferdinando Mussa-Ivaldi of Northwestern University in Chicago has shown how a few brain cells from a lamprey, a primitive eel-like vertebrate can be used to control a robot.

Output from light sensors on the robot was passed to the neurons, and their responses used to control the robot’s movement. The brain cells normally used by the lamprey to orientate itself proved capable of making the robot follow a light source.

It’s not the first time a critter’s brain has been co-opted in this way.

Claire Rind, a neurobiologist at the University of Newcastle, UK, used recordings of the neuronal activity of locusts watching manoeuvring “TIE-fighter” spacecraft from the movie Star Wars to develop extremely accurate obstacle avoidance systems.

US defence research agency DARPA has recently created remote controlled cyborg moths using electrodes in their brains (see a video of the cyborg moths).

7. Magnetic (NMR) computing

Every glass of water contains a computer, if you just know how to operate it.

Susan Stepney and colleagues at the University of York, UK, use strong magnetic fields (nuclear magnetic resonance) to control and observe the way in which molecules interact. This method can represent information in 3D and can also exploit the natural dynamics of how molecules interact.

If successful it may prove possible to model something as complex as our atmosphere using just a thimble of water.

So far, however, the group have only carried out a proof of principle by, somewhat ironically, simulating the water-based computer on a classical computer.

8. Glooper Computer

One of the weirdest computers ever built forsakes traditional hardware in favour of “gloopware”. Andrew Adamatzky at the University of the West of England, UK, can make interfering waves of propagating ions in a chemical goo behave like logic gates, the building blocks of computers.

The waves are produced by a pulsing cyclic chemical reaction called the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction.

Adamatzky has shown that his chemical logic gates can be used to make a robotic hand stir the mixture in which they exist. As the robot’s fingers stimulate the chemicals further reactions are triggered that control the hand.

The result is a sort of robotic existential paradox – did the chemical brain make the robot’s hand move, or the hand tell the brain what to think? Eventually Adamatzky aims to couple these chemical computers to an electroactive gel-based “skin” to create a complete “blob-bot”.

9. Mouldy computers

Even a primitive organism like slime mould can be used to solve problems that are tricky for classical computers.

Toshiyuki Nakagaki at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research in Nagoya, Japan, has shown that slime mould can work out the shortest route through a maze.

In his experiments, the masses of independent amoeba-like cells that act as a single organism would initially spread out to explore all the possible paths of a maze.

But when one train of cells found the shortest path to some food hidden at the maze’s exit the rest of the mass stopped exploring. The slime mould then withdrew from the dead end routes and followed the direct path to the food.

This is interesting for computer scientists because maze solving is similar to the travelling salesman problem, which asks for the shortest route between a number of points in space. The problem quickly scales in complexity as more points are added, making it a tough problem for classical computers.

10. Water wave computing

Perhaps the most unlikely place to see computing power is in the ripples in a tank of water.

Using a ripple tank and an overhead camera, Chrisantha Fernando and Sampsa Sojakka at the University of Sussex, used wave patterns to make a type of logic gate called an “exclusive OR gate”, or XOR gate.

Perceptrons, a type of artificial neural network, can mimic some types of logic gates, but not a XOR. Only encoding the behaviour of a XOR gate into ripples made it possible for the perceptron to learn how that gate works. – nst