U.S. scientist operates colleague's brain from across campus

By Sharon Begley

NEW YORK | Tue Aug 27, 2013 5:26pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Scientists said Tuesday they have achieved the first human-to-human mind meld, with one researcher sending a brain signal via the Internet to control the hand motion of a colleague sitting across the Seattle campus of the University of Washington.

The feat is less a conceptual advance than another step in the years-long progress that researchers have made toward brain-computer interfaces, in which electrical signals generated from one brain are translated by a computer into commands that can move a mechanical arm or a computer cursor - or, in more and more studies, can affect another brain.

Much of the research has been aimed at helping paralyzed patients regain some power of movement, but bioethicists have raised concerns about more controversial uses.

In February, for instance, scientists led by Duke University Medical Center's Miguel Nicolelis used electronic sensors to capture the thoughts of a rat in a lab in Brazil and sent via Internet to the brain of a rat in the United States. The second rat received the thoughts of the first, mimicking its behavior. And electrical activity in the brain of a monkey at Duke, in North Carolina, was recently sent via the Internet, controlling a robot arm in Japan.

That raised dystopian visions of battalions of animal soldiers - or even human ones - whose brains are remotely controlled by others. Some of Duke's brain-computer research, though not this study, received funding from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA.

FINGERING A KEYBOARD

For the new study, funded by the U.S. Army Research Office and other non-military federal agencies, UW professor of computer science and engineering Rajesh Rao, who has studied brain-computer interfaces for more than a decade, sat in his lab on August 12 wearing a cap with electrodes hooked up to an electroencephalography machine, which reads electrical activity in the brain.

He looked at a computer screen and played a simple video game but only mentally. At one point, he imagined moving his right hand to fire a cannon, making sure not to actually move his hand.

The EEG electrodes picked up the brain signals of the "fire cannon!" thought and transmitted them to the other side of the UW campus.

There, Andrea Stocco of UW's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences was wearing a purple swim cap with a device, called a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) coil, placed directly over his left motor cortex, which controls the right hand's movement.

When the move-right-hand signal arrived from Rao, Stocco involuntarily moved his right index finger to push the space bar on the keyboard in front of him, as if firing the cannon. He said the feeling of his hand moving involuntarily was like that of a nervous tic.

"It was both exciting and eerie to watch an imagined action from my brain get translated into actual action by another brain," Rao said.

Other experts suggested the feat was not particularly impressive. It's possible to capture one of the few easy-to-recognize EEG signals and send "a simple shock ... into the other investigator's head," said Andrew Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh, who was not part of the research.

Rao agreed that what his colleague jokingly called a "Vulcan mind meld" reads only simple brain signals, not thoughts, and cannot be used on anyone unknowingly. But it might one day be harnessed to allow an airline pilot on the ground help someone land a plane whose own pilot is incapacitated.

The research has not been published in a scientific journal, something university spokeswoman Doree Armstrong admits is "a bit unusual." But she said the team knew other researchers are working on this same thing and they felt "time was of the essence."

Besides, she said, they have a video of the experiment which "they felt it could stand on its own." The video is here

The absence of a scientific publication that other researchers could scrutinize did not sit well with some of the nation's leading brain-computer-interface experts. All four of those reached by Reuters praised UW's Rao, but some were uneasy with the announcement and one called it "mostly a publicity stunt." The experiment was not independently verified.

(The story corrects funding source in fifth paragraph and eliminates reference to Skype in eighth)

(Reporting by Sharon Begley; editing by Julie Steenhuysen and Cynthia Osterman)

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NASA Satellite Images Provide Clues to Understanding Fire across the Globe [Slide Show]

For two weeks in April the world was ablaze. NASA satellites documented these infernos, both wild and controlled, as they burned from the U.S. to Australia

By Erin Brodwin

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Image: NASA Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response Team, GSFC

Wildfires can start spontaneously; vegetation can become so dry that sunlight can ignite it. Farmers also set deliberate, controlled fires, usually to clear crop residue in preparation for a new planting season. All of those fires play a role in the planet’s carbon cycle, which is why in October 2011 the newly formed NASA Fire and Smoke initiative began using NASA’s MODIS (Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) to track them. The MODIS project consists of two electromagnetic measuring instruments observing Earth’s surface from the satellites Terra and Aqua, which are in polar orbits but travelling in opposite directions; together, they monitor wildfires and agricultural burns across the planet. This month was the first time ever that MODIS captured fires raging almost simultaneously around the globe.

View the Global Fire slide show.

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Japanese fish survive 5,000-mile trip across Pacific in tsunami boat

By Elaine Porterfield

SEATTLE | Fri Apr 12, 2013 10:55am EDT

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Scientists are baffled as to how a group of small fish native to Japan survived a journey across the Pacific after they were found on a boat swept away by the 2011 tsunami and washed up last month on the coast of Washington state.

The batch of striped beak fish - five in all - were discovered submerged in the hold of the 20-foot-long fishing skiff, dubbed the Sai-shou-maru, on Long Beach in southwestern Washington.

The vessel, found beached right-side-up, was confirmed this week to have originated from the region of northern Japan devastated in the immense tidal surge generated by the March 2011 Fukushima earthquake.

Other boats carried away by the tsunami have previously washed up along the U.S. Pacific Northwest and Alaska, as have chunks of piers and large quantities of other debris. But the fish found aboard the Sai-shou-maru are the first vertebrates - animals with backbones - known to have made the voyage.

Marine biologists studying the phenomenon are puzzled over precisely how striped beak fish, natural denizens of warmer, shallow southern Japanese waters, ended up as live stowaways in the well of the boat, and how they endured a two-year journey across the ocean.

"It is quite remarkable," Curt Hart, a spokesman for the Washington state Department of Ecology, told Reuters. "Everyone is very amazed that these fish survived for two years in that hold."

The fish were apparently swept up with the skiff as it was washed down the coast of Japan and out into the Pacific.

Scientists surmise that the fish made their home beneath the boat for much of the trip as it drifted upside down and partially submerged, feeding on other organisms that became encrusted or otherwise attached to the inverted vessel. Then they might have been scooped up into the skiff's hold when wind or waves righted the vessel, Hart said.

NOURISHMENT MYSTERY

The middle of the Pacific is far less rich in nutrients than coastal waters, raising questions of how the fish found enough food to survive the trip, said Jeff Adams, an expert at Washington Sea Grant, an agency supporting marine research.

The 6-inch-long striped beak fish, named for their protruding mouths and black-and-white striped markings, were the most surprising of an estimated 30 to 50 species of marine organisms that hitchhiked across the Pacific with the skiff.

Other stowaways included various types of algae, anemones, crabs, marine worms and shellfish.

Many were believed to be non-native species, and all were treated as potentially invasive - capable of displacing native organisms and disrupting the natural ecological balance if allowed to escape into the environment and propagate.

As a precaution, state officials swiftly removed the Sai-shou-maru from the shoreline before samples of organisms were collected for study, and the boat was scraped and steam-cleaned, Hart said.

Four of the fish found alive in the boat on March 22 have since died, and the lone surviving specimen has been moved to an aquarium in Seaside, Oregon.

The Sai-shou-maru is not the only Noah's ark of potential invasive species carried to the U.S. West Coast by the tsunami. Several more Japanese boats have washed ashore since last year in Washington, Oregon and California, and a fishing vessel found drifting off Alaska was scuttled by the Coast Guard.

Dozens of non-native and potentially invasive species - more than hitched a ride aboard the Sai-shou-maru - were previously found attached to two large hunks of piers that washed up, one in Oregon and one in Washington, Hart said.

(Editing by Steve Gorman, Cynthia Johnston and Patrick Graham)

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