Electrical brain signals able to command computers, machines\nSeven paralyzed patients near Stuttgart, Germany, have been surfing the Internet and writing letters to friends from their homes.\nAnd at labs in several universities, monkeys operate mechanical arms with just their brains. At the University of Pittsburgh, a monkey can feed itself chunks of zucchini and orange slices this way.\nThere's nothing supernatural here. These are early steps toward a complex but straightforward technological goal: To use electrical signals from the brain as instructions to computers and other machines, allowing paralyzed people to communicate, move around and control their environment literally without moving a muscle.\nMost dramatically, that could help "locked-in" patients -- those who have lost all muscle movement because of conditions such as Lou Gehrig's disease or brainstem strokes.\nIn fact, far more than half the scientific reports ever published in this area have appeared in the last three years alone, says researcher Dr. Jonathan Wolpaw. And while only about a half-dozen labs seriously worked in the field as late as the mid-1990s, now about 60 labs have gotten into it, he said.\n"The field, in the last four or five years, has kind of exploded," he said.
Scientists discover 70-million-year-old T. rex tissue\nWASHINGTON -- For more than a century, the study of dinosaurs has been limited to fossilized bones. Now, researchers have recovered 70-million-year-old soft tissue, including what might be blood vessels and cells, from a Tyrannosaurus rex.\nIf scientists can isolate proteins from the material, they might be able to learn new details of how dinosaurs lived, said lead researcher Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University.\nScientists are currently running tests on the tissue. But, Schweitzer said, she does not know yet if they will be able to isolate dinosaur DNA from the materials.\nThe soft tissues were recovered from the thighbone of a T. rex, known as MOR 1125, that was found in a sandstone formation in Montana. The dinosaur was about 18 years old when it died. The bone was broken when it was removed from the site. Schweitzer and her colleagues then analyzed the material inside the bone.\nBrooks Hanson, a deputy editor of Science, noted that there are few examples of soft tissues, except for leaves or petrified wood, that are preserved as fossils, just as there are few discoveries of insects in amber or humans and mammoths in peat or ice.\nSchweitzer said that after removing the minerals from the specimen, the remaining tissues were soft and transparent and could be manipulated with instruments.\nThe bone matrix was stretchy and flexible, she said. Also, there were long structures like blood vessels. What appeared to be individual cells were visible.\nShe did not know if they were blood cells. However, scientists will be able to study the protein structure of the tissue at the chemical and cellular level.\nThe research was funded by North Carolina State University and grants from N. Myhrvold and the National Science Foundation.
