Brain chip sought to drive paralyzed limbs
SAN DIEGO, July 25 (UPI) -- Three U.S. universities were given grants to study sensorimotor neural engineering that would allow the brain to communicate with prosthetic or paralyzed limbs.
San Diego State University is one of the schools sharing an $18.5 million National Science Foundation grant to research chips that could be implanted in the brain to send signals to a prosthetic or paralyzed limb, giving it the full dexterity of an undamaged hand or leg, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported Sunday.
Sensors in the limbs would return signals to the brain, sending sensations of heat and cold or recognizing changes in texture, researchers said.
The five-year grant will be shared between SDSU, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Washington.
"NSF always pursues research at the leading edge," foundation spokesman Josh Chamot said. "We're taking proposals that look forward, that could lead to entirely new concepts and technology, entirely new fields. But the fact is that the people who built up this team already have research that shows they can accomplish these goals."
Scientists say the research could lead to commercial products to help wounded veterans, people with spinal cord injuries and those with neurological disorders.
"It's like the Six Million Dollar Man, the bionic man," said Kee Moon, a mechanical engineering professor who will lead SDSU's team.
"We hope, at the end of 10 years, to be able to implant a device on the brain to drive a prosthetic device in a way that the information goes both ways -- from the brain to the device and the device to the brain," he said.
Chesapeake Bay 'dead zone' growing
WASHINGTON, July 25 (UPI) -- A huge underwater "dead zone" of oxygen-starved water in Chesapeake Bay on the U.S. East Coast is growing at an alarming rate, environmental officials say.
Officials in Virginia and Maryland say the growing dead zone is the result of unusually high levels of nutrient pollution this year, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
Covering a third of the bay, the dead zone stretched from Baltimore Harbor to the mid-channel region in the Potomac River, about 83 miles, when measured in late June, the newspaper said.
Dead zones are a yearly occurrence in the bay caused by pollution in water that runs off cities and farms, officials said.
However, heavy flows of contaminated water from the Susquehanna River dumped as much nutrient pollution into the bay by May as usually comes in an entire average year, a Maryland Department of Natural Resources researcher said.
Pollution from chemicals such as fertilizers provides a feast for bay algae, which bloom and die in a rapid cycle, pulling oxygen from the water and threatening Chesapeake Bay shad, rockfish, oysters and crabs.
"If there's not good habitat, they're stressed and they won't reproduce,'' Bruce Michael, director of the DNR's resource assessment service, said. "They're more susceptible to disease and won't eat. We want them to eat a lot of food and reproduce and grow."
Cave art could be Britain's oldest
SWANSEA, Wales, July 25 (UPI) -- A wall carving in a south Wales cave dated to the Ice Age 14,000 years ago could be Britain's oldest example of rock art, an archaeologist says.
The faint scratchings of a speared reindeer are believed to have been carved by an ancient hunter-gatherer and are "very, very exciting," George Nash of Bristol University said.
Nash made the discovery while exploring the caves on Wales' Gower peninsula in September 2010.
"For 20-odd years I have been taking students to this cave and talking about what was going on there," he said.
"They went back to their cars and the bus and I decided to have a little snoop around in the cave as I've never had the chance to do it before.
"Within a couple of minutes I was scrubbing at the back of a very strange and awkward recess and there a very faint image bounced in front of me -- I couldn't believe my eyes," he said.
Although the reindeer drawing is similar to many found in northern Europe around 4,000-5,000 years later, the discovery of flint tools in the cave decades ago could indicate the carving's true date, he said.
"In the 1950s, Cambridge University undertook an excavation there and found 300-400 pieces of flint and dated it to between 12,000-14,000 B.C.," Nash said.
The location of the find, now being officially dated and verified by experts at the National Museum of Wales and Cadw, will be revealed to the public in the future, the BBC reported.
New test tells real whiskey from fake
STRATHCLYDE, Scotland, July 25 (UPI) -- Researchers at a Scottish university say their simple test can identify the difference between authentic and counterfeit Scotch whiskey brands.
Researchers from the Department of Pure and Applied Chemistry at the University of Strathclyde have developed a method to compare the content of whiskey samples to determine if they are the whiskey on the label or an imitation brand, a university release reported Monday.
In a series of blind tests, the new method was successful in separating the knockoffs from the real ones.
The researchers analyzed 17 samples of blended whiskey, looking at the concentration of ethanol and colorants using mid-infrared spectrometry and immersion probes that incorporate novel optical fibers.
The procedure can provide quick, accurate analysis without the complexity and cost of some other systems, the researchers said.
"The whiskey industry has tools at its disposal for telling authentic and counterfeit whiskey brands apart but many of them involve lab-based analysis, which isn't always the most convenient system if a sample needs to be identified quickly," said Professor David Littlejohn, the research leader.
""There's a growing need for methods that can provide simpler and faster identification and we have developed a method which could be adapted for devices to use on site, without the need to return samples to a lab," he said.
"It could be of great benefit to an industry which is hugely important to the economy."
