Amazing DSI Brain Scanning Visualizes Your Mind's Inner Workings In 3D

What's that monkey thinking about when he's mushing down that banana or tossing feces at you? Well, you're looking at it—this is a map of where a macaque's thoughts live. It's made possible by new 3D visualization algorithms developed by neuroscientists at Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston which render a brain's billions of individual neuron connections in full-color 3D, with each visible strand representing several tens of thousands of the too-small-to-image neural pathways. It's all done by simply applying new processing to existing MRI scan data, and thankfully, it works on human brains too. More »

New Flexible Image Sensors Could Enable Eyeball-Cams, More Realisitc Cyborgs

Traditional camera lenses have to have beefier optics to make up for the fact that the sensor is flat—but one reason why the human eye is such an efficient little cam at (576 megapixels! ISO 800!) is because our image sensors (err, retinas) are rounder to better capture the light transmitted by the lens on the other side of the sphere. Researchers at Northwestern and the University of Illinois have found a way to create a traditional photo sensor that flexes without breaking, which means your cyborg glass eye of the future will be all the more lifelike. More »