R4TB0T
Okay, this is cool. There's a scientist at the University of Florida who has managed to cultivate 25,000 rat neural cells into a brain capable of piloting a flight simulator. link. Basically, he took living brain cells, and cultivated them over a set of 60 electrodes, to create a input/output link between the rat brain and the computer.

Another neat story for the day: A scientist at the University of Southern California is working on a prosthetic brain. He's building an implantable chip that can simulate the effect of storing memory. link Let's take that idea a little further out and say that the chip need not be installed empty. In theory, you can remove the chip and extract data from it. Once that's done, we would just have to decrypt the brain's storage pattern, and we would have access to real memories. Further, we could re-encrypt new memories, and reinsert the chip. Instant learning. "I know Kung Fu"

To take that even further, you could make the chip interactive. Assuming ungodly wireless bandwidth, you could make the chip in your head call in to a main server to send a specific set of your memories, and it could reply by replacing certain other memories in your head. Suddenly, you could play virtual games in your head, multiplayer with anyone in the world. Here's what I see happening:

Jim's eyes narrowed as his Gorilla fell lacerated to the floor. The tiger-bat danced in front of his gorilla, then jumped up and down on the gorilla's body. Jim sneered a little as he pulsed, "F4K3R. R4TB0T"

He didn't accuse the tiger deliberately, it was almost unconcious. Whenever somebody beats you down really well, you call them a RatBot. Some SuX0Rs would buy a RatBrain, hook it up to the game, and tie their pleasure center to their character's health. After the RatBot figured the game out, their L4M3R owners would let it play for him online. The game companies were still trying to figure out how to ban RatBots, but since they played the same way as anyone, the best the companies could do was publish names of any players that played for an unhealthy amount of time. Of course, people were figuring out how to fake that too.

As soon as Jim pulsed his message, the string of characters spilled out of his mind into a server two miles away. From there, the pattern was shot fifty miles away to a translation station, where a Kinkajou brain translated messages all day (chosen for it's surprising aptitude for multitasking). It was told where the message was going (Just East of the Euphrates in Northern Africa), and where it was coming from (Dayton, Ohio, United States). The Kinkajou called up all the languages characteristic of those regions, then recognized American L33T, and converted it to English, before making it into Farsi and sending the message on it's way.

Almost as soon as he finished thinking it, the response came back in big red 3D letters bouncing at the lower end of his peripheral vision. "U W15H, L4M3R. C0G1T0, 3RG0 R0X0R. LOLOLOLOLOL."

Jim shut his eyes and shut off the game. When he opened his eyes, the Gorilla and the TigerBat were missing, all the blood cleaned off the bathroom floor. He stood up, wiped, flushed, and went back to his trig class, scowling.

- posted by BrandG @ 11:37 PM