Article Abstract:
Researchers using animal and human neurological studies have developed a digital analog silicon circuit of 16 artificial neurons. The circuit uses feedback to calculate signal strength. Digital activity is either on or off. Analog signals shade or vary the intensity of the signal. This disctinction is thought to be important to the functioning of human perception, where a listner can distinguish and tune into the voice speaking to it out off a babble of background noise. Vision works in this fashion as well. The hybrid circuits may be used as an aid to hearing or sight impaired humans, or to give sight and hearing to robots.
User Contributions:
Comment about this article or add new information about this topic:
Article Abstract:
A pediatric ophthalmologist, Dr. Alan Chow, and his brother, Vincent, invented a microchip that is being implanted in volunteers' eyes to serve as artificial retinas. Dr. Chow's company, Optobionics, makes the silicon implant. He has his detractors who think his solution requires too much light to make the implant work. Other researchers are Dr. Joseph Rizzo at the Harvard-MIT Retinal Implant Project; Dr. Florian Gekeler of the University Eye Hospital in Tubingen, Germany; and Dr. Mark S. Humayun at the Wilmer Ophthalmological Institute at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
User Contributions:
Comment about this article or add new information about this topic:
Article Abstract:
Researchers at the University of Maryland at Baltimore have found a way to potentially manufacture faster computer chips. Dr. Yanhua Shih, a physicist, and his team have verified the possibility of forcing photons into pairs in order to go beyond the limits of a rule of classical optics. They are using quantum theory to manipulate light, which is part of the process that etches computer chips.
User Contributions:
Comment about this article or add new information about this topic: