Sally Adee’s experienced her improved capacity on the shooting range. However, in the future this technology of neural enhancement may find common use outside of the military and enter normal society. Because of this, bio-ethicists are already having a field day with the implications of human enhancement, but the supporters of transhumanism – who want to ‘transcend’ our biological limits through technology – are of course elated with these results.

Who knows, in a few years time, our teenagers will be in school wearing all sorts of hip hats, bands and wigs with some tiny batteries and nearly invisible electrodes, living a neurosis-free life of easy learning and enhanced smarts. On the other hand, will those who are brilliantly evil now, be even more brilliant at being evil after wearing one of these thinking caps…? Cue dramatic music. Also, how would an overdose of this ‘drug’ look? A bit crisp?

Check out Sally’s personal article on the experience on her blog and read her New Scientist article explaining more about the technology.

Read a whole article on this fascinating find on the Scientific American site and watch a video of the technology in action below:

Further reading also available at BBC News

“While it may not help you learn how to Kung Fu fight or fly a B212 Helicopter, a neurofeedback method of learning is reminiscent of something we might have seen in the movie, The Matrix.

The technique would provide more immediate and long-lasting knowledge in tasks that demand a significant level of visual performance, like hitting a curve ball or learning to play the piano.

Researchers from Boston University (BU) and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan recently demonstrated that they could induce brain activity patterns to match a targeted state by decoding a person’s functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan of their visual cortex.

In the future, researchers envision a person watching a computer screen and having their brain patterns manipulated to match those of a desired level of task performance, perhaps of an athlete or someone healing from an accident or disease.

Their findings were published in the most recent issue of Science.

“Adult early visual areas are sufficiently plastic to cause visual perceptual learning,” lead author and BU neuroscientist Takeo Watanabe said in a National Science Foundation press release.

However, there is one wrinkle in this Matrix-style approach to learning: the method worked on subjects even when they weren’t aware of what they were learning.

“We found that subjects were not aware of what was to be learned while behavioral data obtained before and after the neurofeedback training showed that subjects’ visual performance improved specifically for the target orientation,” Watanabe said.

Fascinating — sure — but this does open up the door to hypnosis and mind control, which Watanabe is keenly aware of.

“We have to be careful,” he said, “so that this method is not used in an unethical way.” Sounds like a good plot line for the next Matrix movie.”

Via Discovery News (Thanks Annette)

You may have heard about the kerfuffle caused by PayPal recently when they blocked a gift exchange initiative for 200 children organised by Regretsy.

According to Regretsy:

“We took many applications, vetted them carefully and set about creating a giant gift exchange program, where you could buy a gift for the over 200 children we’re helping.

We raised so much money that we found ourselves in a position of not just being able to send toys, but to send a monetary gift to the families as well. We hoped it might help them make their holiday dinners more special, or maybe pay a pressing bill.

Paypal shut it down.

Apparently we made the mistake of using the “Donate” button, which Paypal is now claiming is only for nonprofit organizations to use.* They froze the account, which also includes Zazzle money that we use to make emergency gifts. That money isn’t in issue, but what the hell! Might as well keep everything!”

You can read the full account, including a jaw-dropping phone conversation with a PayPal representative here.

After Regretsy publicised this and the web caught whiff of what was happening, Paypal reached out to Regretsy again to discuss the usage of the Donation button and to clarify that the information that they’d been given before had been false.

The upshot of all this is that PayPal has now agreed to send a $100 donation to each of the families that Regretsy was planning to send gifts to this Christmas.

Regretsy is the fail blog of hand crafts. Almost everything posted is collected from the web site, Etsy, though sometimes they feature crafting failures from other sites.

(Thanks Bruno)

“Henrik Ehrsson uses mannequins, rubber arms and virtual reality to create body illusions, all in the name of neuroscience.

It is not every day that you are separated from your body and then stabbed in the chest with a kitchen knife.

But such experiences are routine in the lab of Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who uses illusions to probe, stretch and displace people’s sense of self. Today, using little more than a video camera, goggles and two sticks, he has convinced me that I am floating a few metres behind my own body. As I see a knife plunging towards my virtual chest, I flinch. Two electrodes on my fingers record the sweat that automatically erupts on my skin, and a nearby laptop plots my spiking fear on a graph.

Out-of-body experiences are just part of Ehrsson’s repertoire. He has convinced people that they have swapped bodies with another person1, gained a third arm2, shrunk to the size of a doll or grown to giant proportions3. The storeroom in his lab is stuffed with mannequins of various sizes, disembodied dolls’ heads, fake hands, cameras, knives and hammers. It looks like a serial killer’s basement. “The other neuroscientists think we’re a little crazy,” Ehrsson admits.

But Ehrsson’s unorthodox apparatus amount to more than cheap trickery. They are part of his quest to understand how people come to experience a sense of self, located within their own bodies. The feeling of body ownership is so ingrained that few people ever think about it — and those scientists and philosophers who do have assumed that it was unassailable.”

Read more at Nature.com (Thanks Annette)

The organisation has invited potential applicants to solve a visual code posted at an unbranded standalone website.

The challenge has also been “seeded” to social media sites, blogs and forums.

A spokesman said the campaign aimed to raise the profile of GCHQ to an audience that would otherwise be difficult to reach.

“The target audience for this particular campaign is one that may not typically be attracted to traditional advertising methods and may be unaware that GCHQ is recruiting for these kinds of roles,” the spokesman said.

“Their skills may be ideally suited to our work and yet they may not understand how they could apply them to a working environment, particularly one where they have the opportunity to contribute so much.”

The competition began in secret on 3 November and will continue until 12 December.

GCHQ said that once the code was cracked individuals would be presented with a keyword to enter into a form field. They would then be redirected to the agency’s recruitment website.

The organisation said it was not worried that the problem’s answer might be spread around the internet.

It said it would still benefit because the resulting discussion would “generate future recruitment enquiries”.

However, it added that anyone who had previously hacked illegally would be ineligible. The agency’s website also states that applicants must be British citizens.”

Read more at BBC News (Thanks @siobha)

“It’s a moral and ethical problem that has been studied before: you see a train heading towards five hikers and you have the power to save them. Just pull a switch to make the train swerve out of the way on another track. BUT you’ll kill another hiker who won’t see the train coming at all. What do you do? Intervene? Or no?

Variations on this have vexed philosophers (and their students) for decades. Carlos David Navarrete, an evolutionary psychologist at Michigan State University, decided to apply a little technology to the problem.

He created a 3D, virtual environment in which subjects would experience the actual situation. Each subject was given a joystick that would throw the (virtual) switch, thus saving five people by sacrificing one. To monitor their emotional states, he attached sensors to the subjects’ fingertips. This is the first time anyone has measured a “physical” response to the ethical dilemma.

The result itself wasn’t that surprising: of the 147 participants, 133 (90.5 percent) pulled the switch to divert the train, resulting in the death of the one person. Fourteen participants allowed the train to kill the five. Eleven participants did not pull the switch at all, while three pulled the switch but then returned it to its original position. All this is consistent with earlier studies that didn’t use virtual reality.

The new data shows, however, that participants who did not pull the switch were more emotionally aroused. Nobody knows why that is. It may be because people “freeze up” during highly anxious moments, such as when soldiers fail to use their weapons in battle, Navarrete said in a press release.

For Navarette, the interesting thing was that while most people made the utilitarian choice -– sacrificing one to save many –- humans have to overcome a natural aversion to hurting other people. Rationalizing the choice (weighing the costs and benefits) can help people overcome that to make tough decisions like that. But in some cases, a person can get so anxious that they can’t make a decision at all, or make the wrong one.”

Via Discovery News (Thanks Annette)

“A self-styled “jet man” has performed another death-defying stunt – flying alongside two Albatross aircraft above the Swiss Alps. Adventurer Yves Rossy flew in a custom-built jet suit over the mountain range in formation with the aircraft. Rossy, 51, launched himself from the side of a helicopter before taking his place alongside the two jets high above the Alps.

The daredevil – who used to fly fighter jets with the Swiss airforce – wears a jet suit which has a wing span of two metres. The pack weighs around 120lb and is fitted with four engines that enable him to travel at speeds in excess of 125mph. Once the flight was completed, the adventurer safely parachuted back down to the ground.

Rossy is still the first man in the history of aviation to fly with a jet-propelled wing, a feat he first achieved in 2006. In May 2008, he flew in his suit over the Swiss Alps for the first time and then crossed the English Channel later that year. Since then, he has worked on the design of his jet-pack which has led to his first formation flights and acrobatics.”

Read more at Sky (Thanks Annette)

“Fans of the Terminator franchise may be thrilled but others may be confused over just what a bionic contact lens adds to humanity. According to the developers at Washington University, users could view floating emails and text messages as well as augment their sight with computer-generated images. They say it has been successfully tested on animals (presumably those with email accounts) and when problems such as finding a decent power source are ironed out it could be ready for market.

Is this what the world has been waiting for – or is technology bringing us a load of pointless new kit? What, given a top team of boffins and a whopping budget, would be the innovation of the future you’d like to see?”

Via Guardian (Thanks Annette)

Interactive Robotic Painting Machine (2011) from benjamin grosser on Vimeo.

“Artist and composer Ben Grosser, who is working on an MFA in New Media at the University of Illinois, has developed a robot that’s able to hear the world around it and use those sounds to create a painting.

The Interactive Robotic Painting Machine has a microphone that captures surrounding sound and a genetic algorithm designed to transform those sounds into computer code ultimately drives the robot’s paintbrush in three dimensions, controlling how much paint to put on the brush and how much pressure to apply to canvass.

The sounds can come from people in the room or, when people aren’t around, can come from the machine itself. In a related project called HeadSwap, the robotic painter collaborated with violinist Benjamin Sung, who played music composed by Zack Browning. At the same time that Sung was watching the machine paint and using what he saw to inform his music, the machine was listening to Sung play and using that to inform its art.

On his website, Ben says, “It is important to understand that what the machine paints is not a direct mapping of what it hears. Instead, the system is making its own decisions about what it does while being influenced by others.”"

Via Discovery News (Thanks Annette)