For many paralyzed people, their problem is a communication gap. They can generate the signals in their brain require to control their muscles–to walk, to wash dishes, to weed a garden. But damage to their nervous system prevents those signals from reaching their destination.

Last year, in a feature I wrote for National Geographic about the brain, I recounted the work of scientists and engineers who are trying to bridge that gap. Their dream is to create a technology that reads signals from people’s brains and uses them to control machines. The machines might be robot arms that people could use to feed themselves, or computers to compose emails, or perhaps even exoskeletons that could enable people to walk.

Scientists have been investigating these brain-machine interfaces for decades, and in recent years they’ve made some impressive advances–some of which I described in my story. But it would be wrong to giddily declare that scientists have reached their goal. You need only look at this picture below to get a sense of how far we are from science-fiction dreams.

Continue reading “Wi-Fi Brain Implants For Robot Arms” →

Let’s say you’re a baby bird. In particular, you’re a chick belonging to the species Laniocera hypopyrra, which also goes by the elegant common name of the cinereous mourner. You hatch out of your egg and find yourself in a nest up in tree in a rain forest in Peru. You can’t fly. You can only wait for your parents to bring you food. You are, in other words, easy pickings.

So what might you do to avoid getting snatched up by a predator? Perhaps you might hold very still so as not to attract attention. Perhaps you might also grow dull, bark-colored feathers to help you blend into you background.

If you’re a cinereous mourner, however, this is not what you do. As you can see in this video, you grow brilliant orange plumage. You make yourself absurdly easy to see. Continue reading “The Caterpillar Defense” →

This week I wrote my New York Times columnabout one of those remarkable studies that makes you realize how little we understand about the natural world. Ken Catania, a biologist at Vanderbilt University, performed some elegantly simple experiments that revealed that electric eels use electricity as a taser and as a remote control for their prey.

To read mostly straight-text accounts of the research, you can read my column, as well as fellow Phenom Ed Yong’s blog post. But the video that Catania filmed as part of his research is so interesting I thought offer a moving-pictures recap here.

Continue reading “Masters of Electricity (The Video Version)” →