Free Republic

Clusters of lab-raised brain cells connected to a computer are capable of elementary speech recognition and math problems. Feng Guo, a bioengineer in the Department of Intelligent Systems Engineering at Indiana University, Bloomington, said his study is a major step in demonstrating how brain-inspired computer neural networks can advance artificial intelligence capabilities. Guo and his team grew bundles of specialized stem cells that developed into neurons, the main component of the brain. A typical brain consists of 86 billion neurons, each neuron connected to as many as 10,000 other neurons. The ball of neurons, known as an organoid, created in...

Below the surfaces of freshwater springs, lakes and rivers, sunken landscapes hold clues about the daily lives, beliefs and diets of the first humans to settle in what is now the United States. But submerged prehistory, as the study of these millennia-old sites is widely known, is often overlooked in favor of more traditional underwater archaeology centered on shipwrecks...From Miami to Lake Huron to Warm Mineral Springs, these are three sites driving the conversation about the nascent discipline.The hunt for sunken evidence of early humans in North America began some 60 years ago with a swirl of controversy in southwestern...

Stem cells taken from adult human bone marrow have been manipulated by scientists at the Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to generate aggregates of cells called spheres that are similar to those derived from neural stem cells of the brain. In addition, the bone marrow-derived stem cells, which could be differentiated into neurons and other cells making up the central nervous system, spread far and wide and behaved like neural stem cells when transplanted into the brain tissue of chicken embryos. Results of the experiments, described in the February 2007 of the Journal of Neuroscience Research, support...