Cantankerous Buddha: Electromagnetism

Showing posts with label Electromagnetism. Show all posts

20160315

Magnetic mind control works in live animals, makes mice happy

For a bunch of mind-controlled mice, walking into a magnetic field has never felt sooo good.

The imperceptible force that the genetically tweaked rodents wandered through fired up the reward-related circuits in their brains, likely conjuring the pure pleasure experienced when, for instance, they ate a yummy treat, researchers report Monday in Nature Neuroscience. Of course, this meant that the mice didn’t want to leave that happy magnetic field.

While getting mice to congregate in specific, magnetized areas may be useful for pest control, the experiment demonstrates a much more powerful point: that researchers can remotely control specific brain circuits in living animals with just magnets. The finding paves the way for magnetic mind control to help study the functions and malfunctions of the brain—plus the use of ‘magneto-genetic’ therapies to treat brain disorders, the authors report.

“This is, to our knowledge, the first demonstration of bona fide magnetic control of the nervous system,” the authors, led by biomedical scientist Ali Güler at the University of Virginia, concluded.

Of course, over the years, scientists have come up with other ways to control specific circuitry in brains, including using light signals (optogenetics) and drugs (chemogenetics). But those methods have some notable drawbacks. Light signals, for instance, have trouble beaming deep into brain tissues, dimming their usefulness in some brain regions. Drugs, on the other hand, can reach deep, but they can take their time seeping in and out. This makes controlling brain processes in real, physiological time tricky...

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/03/magnetic-mind-control-works-in-live-animals-makes-mice-happy/

20140916

Electromagnetic Warfare Is Here

In the 2001 action movie Ocean’s Eleven, criminals use an electromagnetic weaponto black out a portion of Las Vegas. Very futuristic, you may say, but the threat is real and growing.

The problem is growing because the technology available to attackers has improved even as the technology being attacked has become more vulnerable. Our infrastructure increasingly depends on closely integrated, high-speed electronic systems operating at low internal voltages. That means they can be laid low by short, sharp pulses high in voltage but low in energy—output that can now be generated by a machine the size of a suitcase, batteries included.

Electromagnetic (EM) attacks are not only possible—they are happening. One may be under way as you read this. Even so, you would probably never hear of it: These stories are typically hushed up, for the sake of security or the victims’ reputation. Occasionally, though, an incident comes to light.

In May 2012, for instance, the Korea Herald reported that over 500 aircraft flying in and out of South Korea’s Incheon and Gimpo airports reported GPS failures, as did hundreds of ships and fishing boats in the sea west of Incheon Airport. The source of the EM fields was traced to the North Korean city of Kaesong, about 50 kilometers north of Incheon. South Korean officials indicated that North Korea had imported truck-based jamming systems in 2010 that had the capability to jam GPS signals. These officials speculated that one purpose of the jamming was to interfere with South Korea’s highly digital society. Or perhaps the North Koreans were conducting an experiment, using South Korea as their beta tester...

http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/military/electromagnetic-warfare-is-here

20111101

Twenty years of fMRI

Functional magnetic resonance imaging, better known as fMRI, is 20 years old this week. October’s NeuroPod marks the celebrations by looking back at the brain scanning technology, it’s successes, and its troublesome teenage years.

The imaging technique was first announced in a 1991 study published in Science that announced how a standard MRI scanner could be used to used to track where oxygenated and deoxygenated blood flowed in the brain.

The technique takes advantage of the fact that haemoglobin, the iron containing protein that carries oxygen to essential tissues in the body, is differently magnetic when it is carrying oxygen, in comparison to when it is oxygen depleted.