prosthetic knowledge

Microcontrollers as Craft Material 

High-Low Tech have put together some tools and techniques to integrate electronics into craft works:

We’ve developed a set of tools and techniques that make it easy to use microcontrollers as an art or craft material, embedding them directly into drawings or other artifacts. We use the ATtiny45 from Atmel, a small and cheap (~$1) microcontroller that can be glued directly to paper or other objects. We then construct circuits using conductive silver ink, dispensed from squeeze bottles with needle tips. This makes it possible to draw a circuit, adding lights, speakers, and other electronic components. Alternatively, you can make circuits with copper tape (as well as simple circuits without microcontrollers).

To program the microcontroller, we’ve developed a set of hardware and software tools. The TinyProgrammer plugs into the USB port of a computer and loads a program onto the microcontroller. We’ve also developed a plugin for the Arduino software that makes it easy to write the code that runs on the microcontroller. We call this set of tools an “untoolkit” because it provides the ease-of-use of other electronic toolkits but using off-the-shelf electronic components.

More Here

MIT: Glasses-free 3-D TV looks nearer 

MIT Media Lab makes an attempt to see how 3D monitors could be constructed with current available technology. Above is not some new type of glitch art (yet algorithms are used for visual compression) - they are images for several layers which will be played simultaneously to form a moving image with depth. The video embedded below demonstrates their method:

As striking as it is, the illusion of depth now routinely offered by 3-D movies is a paltry facsimile of a true three-dimensional visual experience. In the real world, as you move around an object, your perspective on it changes. But in a movie theater showing a 3-D movie, everyone in the audience has the same, fixed perspective — and has to wear cumbersome glasses, to boot.

Despite impressive recent advances, holographic television, which would present images that vary with varying perspectives, probably remains some distance in the future. But in a new paper featured as a research highlight at this summer’s Siggraph computer-graphics conference, the MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture group offers a new approach to multiple-perspective, glasses-free 3-D that could prove much more practical in the short term.

Interesting read here, which research into the current state of the technology. I wonder how close it is to this piece of tech currently in development?

Researchers show that memories reside in specific brain cells 

From MIT News - Simply activating a tiny number of neurons can conjure an entire memory:

Our fond or fearful memories — that first kiss or a bump in the night — leave memory traces that we may conjure up in the remembrance of things past, complete with time, place and all the sensations of the experience. Neuroscientists call these traces memory engrams.

But are engrams conceptual, or are they a physical network of neurons in the brain? In a new MIT study, researchers used optogenetics to show that memories really do reside in very specific brain cells, and that simply activating a tiny fraction of brain cells can recall an entire memory — explaining, for example, how Marcel Proust could recapitulate his childhood from the aroma of a once-beloved madeleine cookie.

“We demonstrate that behavior based on high-level cognition, such as the expression of a specific memory, can be generated in a mammal by highly specific physical activation of a specific small subpopulation of brain cells, in this case by light,” says Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at MIT and lead author of the study reported online today in the journal Nature. “This is the rigorously designed 21st-century test of Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield’s early-1900s accidental observation suggesting that mind is based on matter.”

Read more at MIT News here

(Image - An image of a transgenic mouse hippocampus | Image: Nikon Small World Gallery)