First two-way interaction between a primate brain and a virtual body

In a first-ever demonstration of a two-way interaction between a primate brain and a virtual body, two monkeys trained at the Duke University Center for Neuroengineering learned to employ brain activity alone to move an avatar hand and identify the texture of virtual objects.

“Someday in the near future, quadriplegic patients will take advantage of this technology not only to move their arms and hands and to walk again, but also to sense the texture of objects placed in their hands, or experience the nuances of the terrain on which they stroll with the help of a wearable robotic exoskeleton,” said study leader Miguel Nicolelis, MD, PhD, professor of neurobiology at Duke University Medical Center and co-director of the Duke Center for Neuroengineering.

Without moving any part of their real bodies, the monkeys used their electrical brain activity to direct the virtual hands of an avatar to the surface of virtual objects and, upon contact, were able to differentiate their textures.

Although the virtual objects employed in this study were visually identical, they were designed to have different artificial textures that could only be detected if the animals explored them with virtual hands controlled directly by their brain’s electrical activity.

The texture of the virtual objects was expressed as a pattern of minute electrical signals transmitted to the monkeys’ brains. Three different electrical patterns corresponded to each of three different object textures.

Because no part of the animal’s real body was involved in the operation of this brain-machine-brain interface, these experiments suggest that in the future patients severely paralyzed due to a spinal cord lesion may take advantage of this technology, not only to regain mobility, but also to have their sense of touch restored, said Nicolelis, who was senior author of the study published in the journal Nature on October 5, 2011.

“This is the first demonstration of a brain-machine-brain interface (BMBI) that establishes a direct, bidirectional link between a brain and a virtual body,” Nicolelis said

“In this BMBI, the virtual body is controlled directly by the animal’s brain activity, while its virtual hand generates tactile feedback information that is signaled via direct electrical microstimulation of another region of the animal’s cortex.”

“We hope that in the next few years this technology could help to restore a more autonomous life to many patients who are currently locked in without being able to move or experience any tactile sensation of the surrounding world,” Nicolelis said.

“This is also the first time we’ve observed a brain controlling a virtual arm that explores objects while the brain simultaneously receives electrical feedback signals that describe the fine texture of objects ‘touched’ by the monkey’s newly acquired virtual hand,” Nicolelis said.

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South African fossils: Between ape and human

Two fossil skeletons of early humans appear to mark a halfway stage between primitive "ape-men" and our direct ancestors.

A year of detailed study has revealed that the skeletons are a hodgepodge of anatomical features: some bones look almost human while others are chimpanzee-like.

The two fossils, an adult female and a juvenile male, were discovered in the Malapa cave system near Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2008.

Both about 1.2 metres tall, they are unusually complete and well-preserved and date from 1,977,000 years ago.

Excavated by Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and colleagues, they were given the name Australopithecus sediba.

Australopithecines were early hominids that lived between 4 and 2 million years ago: the best-known fossil example is a 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis skeleton found in Ethiopia and nicknamed Lucy. Unlike chimpanzees and other apes, they walked on two legs, but their brains were still small. Not until Homo erectus evolved, around 1.8 million years ago, did larger brains appear.

Together with a large team of researchers, Berger has spent the last year intensively studying the two A. sediba skeletons. He says they are unusually advanced for an Australopithecus, and may show how the australopiths evolved into humans.
Brainy

One area of particular interest is the brain size. So far, the male skull has been excavated. It's also been named: South African schoolchildren chose the name Karabo, which means "answer" in the Setswana and Sotho languages of southern Africa.

Kristian Carlson of the University of the Witwatersrand and colleagues used synchrotron scans to build a detailed 3D image of the inside of the skull, allowing them to calculate the shape of Karabo's brain.

This was small even for an australopith, with a volume of just 420 cubic centimetres. A. afarensis, by contrast, averaged 459 cc, despite being an earlier species. That suggests there was no overall increase in brain size over the course of australopith evolution.

But Carlson says A. sediba's brain had been subtly reorganised. The orbitofrontal region, which sits just behind the eyes, is a different shape to those of other australopiths and apes, and may have been rewired into a more human-like design.

Carlson draws particular attention to an area called the inferior frontal gyrus, which has bulged out in A. sediba. In modern humans this area is important for language processing, hinting that A. sediba had advanced communication skills.

Carlson remains cautious, however, pointing out that spoken language relies on adaptations like vocal cords. Although neck bones were part of the find, they have not yet been studied in detail, so we don't know if A. sediba was built for speech.

We need to treat the brain studies with great caution, says Robert Barton of Durham University in the UK. "Interpretation of surface features of brains is fraught at the best of times," he says, "but on individual specimens that are merely impressions of the original brain and millions of years old to boot?"

Iran satellite is step towards Monkey and human space flight

On 15 June, Iran put its second ever satellite, Rasad-1, into orbit 260 kilometres above Earth. The nation hopes to use the experience to launch a monkey into space this year and, by 2019, a human. The worry is that such rockets could also be used to fire missiles at targets on Earth.

At 15 kilograms, Rasad-1 may be tiny, but it is a boost to Iran's space capabilities, says Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation think tank, headquartered in Washington DC.

"People wondered after the first time if they just got lucky," he says. "Now that they've put two satellites up there, that indicates perhaps it wasn't a fluke the first time. It demonstrates that their rocket technology is pretty good."

Monkey on-boardRasad-1 is reportedly taking low-resolution images of Earth. But its launch seems intended mainly to give the country more experience in launching and operating satellites.

It is one step forward in what looks like an ambitious space plan, says Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "They have this pretty ambitious list of six or seven satellites over the next three years," she says.

At least one of them is expected to carry an animal on board. Iran's state-run television company says the country will launch a monkey into orbit on a one-way trip "later this year". It also says Iran plans to launch an astronaut into space by 2019.

"The monkey seems perfectly plausible," Weeden says. Flying and safely returning a human to Earth by 2019 is more of a stretch, but it might be possible for Iran if it is a suborbital hop rather than a more challenging orbital flight, he says.

The Mandrill using colour to attract a partner

A photo of a mandril, which can use body odour to identify potential mates, researchers have found, in a study which lends new support to the theory that humans also have the ability to 'sniff out' suitable partners.

The findings, which are reported by an international team of scientists in a paper today, suggest that scent and smell play a far more pivotal role in primates' mate selection than previously thought

Memes: Replace Genes as Engine driving Human Evolution

The idea of memes as a cultural analogue of genes has been much maligned, and most biologists still reject it. Yet memetics has much to offer in explaining human nature.

MemeTheory
According to meme theory, humans are radically different from all other species because we alone are meme machines.

Human intelligence is not just a bit more or a bit better than other kinds of intelligence, it is something completely different, based on a new evolutionary process and a new kind of information.

Differentiating
The main difference between conventional theories and memetics is this: most biologists assume that culture and language evolved because they helped humans survive and pass on their genes, and that genes retain ultimate control.

Memetics challenges that assumption. Although the capacity for imitation must once have been adaptive for the apes who started it, evolution has no foresight and could not have predicted the consequences of letting loose a new evolutionary process. Nor could it have retained control of memes once they began evolving in their own right.

Proliferation
So memes began to proliferate. What began as an adaptation soon became like a parasite - a new evolving entity that changed the apes and their world forever. Once memes were proliferating, individuals benefited from copying the latest and most successful ones, and then passed on any genes that helped them do so.

Memetic Drive
This "memetic drive" forced their brains to get bigger and bigger, and to become adept at copying the most successful memes, eventually leading to language, art, music, ritual and religion - the successful designs of human culture.

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