Phase III – Stealth Is.

Features Robert Anton Wilson, Terrence McKenna, Aubrey de Grey & more:

Bookmark:

A memristor is a device that, like a resistor, opposes the passage of current. But memristors also have a memory. The resistance of a memristor at any moment depends on the last voltage it experienced, so its behaviour can be used to recall past voltages.

Now memristors are being used in a US military-funded project trying to make brain-like computers, says Wei Lu, who led the team at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor that demonstrated the new behaviour

…

Memristors lend themselves to the task because the way that their resistance gives a glimpse of an earlier voltage is analogous to the way that a synapse’s electrical behaviour is dependent on its past activity.

Lu and colleagues have now provided the first demonstration that the analogy stands up. What’s more, their memristors were built with materials already used in the manufacture of computer chips.

Lu’s team used a mixture of silicon and silver to join two metal electrodes where they cross. The junction mimics a particular behaviour of synapses that allows neurons to learn new firing patterns, and is believed to allow memories to be stored.

In the brain the timing of electrical signals in two neurons affects the ease with which later messages can jump across the synapse between them. If the pair fire in close succession, the synapse becomes more likely to pass subsequent messages between the two.

Read more at New Scientist

Related External Links

• Generated by LinkCurl

• Generated by LinkCurl
• Neurdon » Robotics and memristors

• Generated by LinkCurl

Bookmark:

Brain on a chip:
How does the human brain run itself without any software? Find that out, say European researchers, and a whole new field of neural computing will open up. A prototype ‘brain on a chip’ is already working.

It’s a strong claim, but Meier is coordinating the EU-supported FACETS project which brings together scientists from 15 institutions in seven countries to do just that. Inspired by research in neuroscience, they are building a ‘neural’ computer that will work just like the brain but on a much smaller scale.
….
Practical neural computers could be only five years away. “The first step could be a little add-on to your computer at home, a device to handle very complex input data and to provide a simple decision,” Meier says. “A typical thing could be an internet search.”

Nanotechnology Consumer Products Inventory – An inventory of nanotechnology-based consumer products currently on the market.

50TB Flash Drives made out of a bug protein?

Shifting sound to light may lead to better computer chips

“Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists have for the first time converted the highest frequency sounds into light by reversing a process that converts electrical signals to sound.”

Bookmark: