Look What I found

Okay, remember my post about monkeys controlling robots with their minds?

Get this...

A group of crazy Brit scientists from Reading University have figured out how to literally give a robot a brain. Okay, so it's not a brain per se, but rather a neuron cocktail of electronic signals. But they are authentic rat brain neurons. Here's the scoop on the robot brain:

This is no ordinary robot control system - a plain old microchip connected
to a circuit board. Instead, the controller nestles inside a small pot
containing a pink broth of nutrients and antibiotics. Inside that pot, some
300,000 rat neurons have made - and continue to make - connections with each
other.
As they do so, the disembodied neurons are communicating, sending
electrical signals to one another just as they do in a living creature. We know
this because the network of neurons is connected at the base of the pot to 80
electrodes, and the voltages sparked by the neurons are displayed on a computer
screen.




Thee neuron-guided robots are now pros at "not bumping into things" thanks to their brain juice. Somewhere the is a rat missing 300,000 neurons and running into all sorts of crap.

I'm all for science but let's stop giving animals control over robots. It's about time they started working on human powered robots. Although, I'm pretty sure that not many animals don't have aspirations of world domination or genocide. So, let's be sure to put the human test subject through a very thorough background check and psych evaluation because...you never know.

[Via Gizmodo via New Scientist via SlashDot]