• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Human “Mini Brains” Wirelessly Control Butterflies In Virtual World

October 25, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Virtual worlds, ChatGPT, and AI seem to be all the rage in 2024, with all sorts of developments shaking up not just the technology space, but having wider implications for medicine, politics, and even the judicial system. Now, researchers from Swiss startup FinalSpark have combined a virtual world with tiny human mini brains and built a two-way connection.

The team has been working on a virtual world controlled by brain organoids using a system called Neuroplatform. It’s thought to be the world’s first wetware cloud platform and allows researchers to interact with the brain organoids remotely. These organoids, dubbed “mini brains”, are only pea-sized, but are made up of around 10,000 neurons derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells. 

Advertisement

The 16 organoids that the system runs on are kept in incubators at 37 °C (98.6 °F) and can respond to stimuli through a multi-electrode array (MEA); MEAs are often used in neuroscience to measure the electrical activity of neurons. It 

To demonstrate that the mini brains can respond to stimulation, the team created a virtual world containing a butterfly. If a living human clicks in the virtual world, the software works out whether the click was in the butterfly’s field of view, then the mini brains respond and tell the butterfly to fly towards the location where the click occurred within the virtual world. Otherwise, the butterfly flies randomly in the virtual space.  



“It’s crucial to emphasize that while these movement functions are implemented in software, the decision to use one or the other is driven by the brain organoid’s response to stimulation,” explained Daniel Burger, a research and development engineer working with FinalSpark on the Neuroplatform project, in a blog post.

Advertisement

Instead of running software on traditional computing, Burger also said that you could run software on the mini brains as biological neural networks (BNN). There are several potential advantages to this idea, including that BNNs have “significantly lower energy consumption” compared to supercomputers. 

“We currently compare CPU vs. organoid processing directly,” Burger told The Register. “We still have energy consumption from supporting hardware like incubators and electrical stimulation systems. We don’t yet have an exact 1:1 comparison of CPU vs. organoid including all supporting hardware, but this is something we’re working on quantifying in the near future.”

The paper detailing Neuroplatform is published in Frontiers In Artificial Intelligence.

[H/T: The Register]

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Cricket-Manchester test likely to be postponed after India COVID-19 case
  2. EU to attend U.S. trade meeting put in doubt by French anger
  3. Soccer-West Ham win again, Leicester and Napoli falter
  4. Was Jesus A Hallucinogenic Mushroom? One Scholar Certainly Thought So

Source Link: Human "Mini Brains" Wirelessly Control Butterflies In Virtual World

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • COVID-19 Can Alter Sperm And Affect Brain Development In Offspring, Causing Anxious Behavior
  • Why Do Spiders’ Legs Curl Up Like That When They’re Dead?
  • “Dead Men’s Fingers” Might Just Be The Strangest Fruit On The Planet
  • The South Atlantic’s Giant Weak Spot In The Earth’s Magnetic Field Is Growing
  • Nearly Half A Century After Being Lost, “Zombie Satellite” LES-1 Began Sending Signals To Earth
  • Extinct In the Wild, An Incredibly Rare Spix’s Macaw Chick Hatches In New Hope For Species
  • HUNTR/X Or Giant Squid? Following Alien Claims, We Asked Scientists What They Would Like Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS To Be
  • Flat-Earthers Proved Wrong Using A Security Camera And A Garage
  • Earth Breaches Its First Climate Tipping Point: We’re Moving Into A World Without Coral Reefs
  • Cheese Caves, A Proposal, And Chance: How Scientists Ended Up Watching Fungi Evolve In Real Time
  • Lab-Grown 3D Embryo Models Make Their Own Blood In Regenerative Medicine Breakthrough
  • Humans’ Hidden “Sixth Sense” To Be Mapped Following $14.2 Million Prize – What Is Interoception?
  • Purple Earth Hypothesis: Our Planet Was Not Blue And Green Over 2.4 Billion Years Ago
  • Hippos Hung Around In Europe 80,000 Years Later Than We Thought
  • Officially Gone: Slender-Billed Curlew, Once-Widespread Migratory Bird, Declared Extinct By IUCN
  • Watch: Rare Footage Captures Freaky Faceless Cusk Eels Lurking On The Deep-Sea Floor
  • Watch This Funky Sea Pig Dancing Its Way Through The Deep Sea, Over 2,300 Meters Below The Surface
  • NASA Lets YouTuber Steve Mould Test His “Weird Chain Theory” In Space
  • The Oldest Stalagmite Ever Dated Was Found In Oklahoma Rocks, Dating Back 289 Million Years
  • 2024’s Great American Eclipse Made Some Birds Behave In Surprising Ways, But Not All Were Fooled
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version