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How to make a robotic arm that is able to flex in an infinite number of ways and order it to do so without disorder and confusion? Get yourself an octopus and study it. That is exactly what researchers funded by the Office of Naval Research are doing. Octopuses are boneless, brainy, and ancient...

In about half a second, the human brain (specifically the superior colliculus) will analyze its current environment, and then decide whether or not one thing or another is worth taking any notice of. Exactly how the brain does this is still somewhat a mystery, but we do know that the more sensory...

What do pilots, divers and pharmaceutical trial participants have in common with people being screened for Alzheimer's disease or other ailments affecting the brain such as strokes? The answer is NeuroGraph™, a portable device that provides an almost instantaneous reading of brain activity and can...

Our brains excel at all kinds of things, but when neurobiologists and psychobiologists try to reverse engineer certain brain functions in order to produce a machine or system that might mimic some of the brain's extraordinary abilities, more often than not they fail (or at least engineer something...

The brain is a remarkable piece of work. At a given moment, from a blizzard of incoming data - visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory, taste, memory, etc. - it knows instantly how to classify what information it wants, and discard or store the rest. One sound in a roomful of noise. One object in...

Canines are known for their sensitive sniffers, but now scientists have developed an artificial nose that can operate without chow or regular walks and won't bark at squirrels. Researchers at Tufts University constructed an electronic nose that has about 20 attributes of living noses and their...

Tethered and put through their paces in the lab, they tend to get a bit cranky. But they have the most sensitive noses on the planet, fantastic internal gyros, the most complex visual system known, and muscles so powerful they can instantly lift twice their own body weight. So, scientists are...

The technology has applications for surveillance, information security, access control, identity fraud, gang tracking, banking and finding missing children. It is currently being evaluated for use in airport security and as a counter-terrorism tool. Last February Dr. Atick's work was selected by...

In many domestic and exotic animal species, immunization with killed or live infectious organisms is an effective, low-risk, and relatively inexpensive method of protection against common infectious diseases. But they haven't worked in marine mammals and this is of concern to Navy veterinarians at...

Sometimes, good ideas materialize in some very unlikely places. Take spatial perception for instance. Navy Captain Angus Rupert took a recreational parachute jump back in the 70's, and in his free-fall toward the ground realized that even while tumbling he could tell the direction of down just by...