Though it will be years before spinal bypass surgery reaches even the clinical-experiment stage, researchers at the University of Washington (UW) and the Washington National Primate Research Center, both in Seattle, have figured out a way to get macaque monkeys in their lab to manipulate temporarily paralyzed muscles in their arms using brain-controlled electrical stimulation. In research reported last week in Nature, they describe what happened when they attached electrodes to neurons in a monkey’s motor cortex—the part of the brain that controls voluntary movement—and used fairly simple algorithms to translate activity in these cortical cells into electrical signals that tell muscles when, how much, and how forcefully to contract.

This by itself will be a huge advance in medical technology when it is ready for prime-time.

But wait, there’s more.

Not only have they been able to re-connect the existing brain cells that control, say, a wrist to the muscles in that area, but they found that the monkey could retrain other brain cells to do the same thing.

The most surprising outcome of their experiments is the revelation that motor cortex cells that had previously been dedicated to moving, say, the big toe on a monkey’s left foot or bending its knees could be trained to control its wrists. This flexibility, says Fetz, may allow patients with head injuries that damaged part of the cerebral cortex to still be candidates for a neuroprosthesis.

It’s hard to even imagine the kind of impact this kind of research will have in the future.

Fewer know that the Norwegian Blue actually did exist, apparently. However, it has now “joined the choir invisible,” as it has been extinct for many years. 55 million years, according to one Dr. Waterhouse, who made the finding. (I have doubts about his number, but that’s an other topic for an other time.)

The U.K.’s Daily Mail reported that Dr. Waterhouse noticed a fossilized bone among bird remains found in a mine in Denmark:

Research has now confirmed the bone was part of an upper wing
from a bird in the parrot family. Although the mine was in Denmark,
the birds would also have lived in what is now Norway.

Dr Waterhouse, now assistant curator of natural history at the
Norfolk Museums Service, said: “All that remained was a single
upper wing bone, but it contained characteristic features that
showed it was clearly from a member of the parrot family, about the
size of a yellow-crested cockatoo.”

…

Details of the Norwegian Blue have been published in the latest
issue of Paleontology journal, under the distinctly Pythonesque
title Two New Fossil Parrots (Psittaciformes) from the Lower Eocene
Fur Formation.

Now that’s what I call a dead parrot.

Via mollywood on Twitter.

It is now approaching a quarter of a millennium since our founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence, which is a long time in human years, but not so long in celestial ones. In the year 1006 A.D. a supernova was observed on earth, the remnants of which are shown in detail in this photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, featured as NASA’s picture of the day. At the time it was the second brightest object in the night sky after the moon, and is estimated that the resulting shock wave has traveled at up to 20 million miles an hour over the last 1000 years.

Via LGF