Ice and fire forge a reservoir for life on Mars

Braided fluvial channels (inset) emerge from the edge of glacial deposits roughly 210 million years old on the martian volcano Arsia Mons, nearly twice as high as Mount Everest. (Colors indicate elevation.) Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University/Brown University


                                               Where volcanoes meet glaciers, lakes often form. This happens in many places on Earth and in at least one place off it: Arsia Mons, Mars.
Arsia Monsis one of the largest mountains in the solar system. Wispy water-ice clouds gather near its peak during the Martian afternoon. While it is only the third tallest volcano on Mars, Arsia Mons is 300 km (186 miles) wide and twice as tall as Mount Everest. If Mount Everest were to suddenly erupt today, some of the vast glaciers on its surface would melt producing floods, lakes and debris plains. We now have reason to believe this is exactly what happened on Mars when Arsia Mons was active 200 million years ago.
The evidence for these events lies along the northwest flank of the volcano. Fan-shaped-deposits (FSDs) seen by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter bear a striking resemblance to alluvial deposits. Such deposits are found on Earth in Death Valley, in the mountains of France, and in many places prone to flash-flooding or glacial melting. In 2012, the Mars Curiosity rover found fluvial deposits in the Gale crater. In a recently published study Kathleen Scanlon and her colleagues at Brown, Boston University, and Lancaster University in the UK showed how the FSDs and other geologic features seen near Arsia Mons are best explained by glacial deposits and enormous quantities of water.
"The term 'fan shaped deposit' usually refers to the whole glacial deposit, which was mostly created by ice that was frozen to its bed," said Scanlon, "While we think all the glaciovolcanic edifices in the FSD had englacial lakes surrounding them, the outflow channels at the northwestern edge of the deposit are the only evidence we have for the flow, per se, of large quantities of water here."

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-06-ice-forge-reservoir-life-mars.html#jCp

Researchers discover how a cluster of water molecules adapts to the presence of an extra proton

H2O is the molecule everybody knows, and nobody can live without. But for all its familiarity and import for life, aspects of water's behavior have been hard to pin down, including how it conducts positive charge.

In the current issue of the journal Science, Yale University chemists report tracing how a cluster of water molecules adapts to the presence of an extra proton, the positively charged subatomic particle.

Water constantly encounters stray protons—in biological contexts, as when light impinges on the eye's retina, for example, or in purely chemical contexts, as when water is split by electrolysis, or in technological contexts, as in the operation of fuel cells.

The new research results provide long-sought experimental data that advance understanding of water's ability to conduct charge, and researchers expect the data to help theoretical chemists simulate how positive charge propagates through a more extended three-dimensional water network. This in turn will shed light on the way positive charge moves in biological systems.



"Getting this right is one of the grand challenges of contemporary physical chemistry research, and we believe we've taken a big step," said Yale chemist Mark Johnson, the lead investigator. "We now have a clear picture of how an extra proton effectively 'hides' in a three-dimensional water network, solving a decade-long mystery raised by earlier work that revealed everything except the lair of that critical proton."

Scientists have long known and understood how water conducts negative charge (electrons). But showing how positive charge moves through water has been difficult because water molecules are not spectators in the process, Johnson said, but rather "are in fact intrinsic to the effect."

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-06-cluster-molecules-presence-extra-proton.html#jCp

NRC human spaceflight report says NASA strategy can’t get humans to Mars

A sweeping review of NASA’s human spaceflight program has concluded that the agency has an unsustainable and unsafe strategy that will prevent the United States from achieving a human landing on Mars in the foreseeable future.

The 286-page National Research Council report, the culmination of an 18-month, $3.2 million investigation mandated by Congress, says that to continue on the present course under budgets that don’t keep pace with inflation “is to invite failure, disillusionment, and the loss of the longstanding international perception that human spaceflight is something the United States does best.”

The report makes a case for sending astronauts back to the moon. That had been a key element of NASA’s strategy under President George W. Bush. But President Obama and his advisers explicitly opposed another moon landing (“I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We’ve been there before,” Obama said in a speech on space policy in 2010).

A major argument against returning to the moon was that it didn’t pencil out — that there wasn’t nearly enough money dedicated to the program. Now the NRC’s Committee on Human Spaceflight has come to the same conclusion about the Obama administration’s vision for NASA. If the goal is a human landing on Mars, the current strategy won’t work.

“Absent a very fundamental change in the nation’s way of doing business, it is not realistic to believe that we can achieve the consensus goal of reaching Mars,” Mitch Daniels, the former Indiana governor and co-chair of the committee, said Wednesday morning in an interview.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/nrc-human-spaceflight-report-says-nasa-strategy-cant-get-humans-to-mars/2014/06/04/e6e6060c-ebd6-11e3-9f5c-9075d5508f0a_story.html

New isotopic evidence supporting moon formation via Earth collision with planet-sized body

Thin section of an enstatite chondrite fragment from the asteroid Almahatta Sitta (official name: 2008 TC3). This fragment was observed on 7 October 2008 in the Nubian Desert, Sudan. Credit: Addi Bischoff, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster

A new series of measurements of oxygen isotopes provides increasing evidence that the Moon formed from the collision of the Earth with another large, planet-sized astronomical body, around 4.5 billion years ago. This work will be published in Science on June 6, and will be presented to the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in California on 11th June.

Most planetary scientists believe that the Moon formed from an impact between the Earth and a planet-sized body, which has been given the name Theia. Efforts to confirm that the impact had taken place had centred on measuring the ratios between the isotopes of oxygen, titanium, silicon and others. These ratios are known to vary throughout the solar system, but their close similarity between Earth and Moon conflicted with theoretical models of the collision that indicated that the Moon would form mostly from Theia, and thus would be expected to be compositionally different from the Earth.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-06-isotopic-evidence-moon-formation-earth.html#jCp

MIT lab designs workload-sharing robotic limbs (w/ Video)

Mention "robotic limbs" and one thinks of devices being developed to replace the loss of human limbs. Mention "exoskeleton" and one thinks of a suit governing and bound to the entire body. Researchers at the d'Arbeloff Laboratory for Information Systems and Technology at MIT, led by Professor Harry Asada, Ford Professor of Engineering, have been breaking ground in another direction. They are working in a co-robot world, and they are developing "extras" for what the person already has. Videos showing people performing tasks tell a story of what future work might look like when an extra set of arms or legs will be of significant help. "Supernumerary Robotic Limbs" (SRLs) is the formal term to describe robotic limbs that, when worn, augment limbs already in place.

"Imagine that one day humans will have a third arm and a third leg attached to their body. The extra limbs will help them hold objects, support the human body, share a workload, and streamline the execution of a task. If the movements of such supernumerary limbs are tightly coupled and coordinated with their arms, the human users may come to perceive the extra limbs as an extension of their own body," the Lab team suggest on their site. "The goal of our work is to build a co-robot that becomes a functional extension of the human body."

In such settings, the extra arm or leg attached to the body helps to hold objects, share workloads, and streamline tasks......


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-06-mit-lab-workload-sharing-robotic-limbs.html#jCp

A first for NASA's IRIS: Observing a gigantic eruption of solar material

A coronal mass ejection, or CME, surged off the side of the sun on May 9, 2014, and NASA's newest solar observatory caught it in extraordinary detail. This was the first CME observed by the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, which launched in June 2013 to peer into the lowest levels of the sun's atmosphere with better resolution than ever before. Watch the movie to see how a curtain of solar material erupts outward at speeds of 1.5 million miles per hour.

IRIS must commit to pointing at certain areas of the sun at least a day in advance, so catching a CME in the act involves some educated guesses and a little bit of luck.

"We focus in on active regions to try to see a flare or a CME," said Bart De Pontieu, the IRIS science lead at Lockheed Martin Solar & Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, California. "And then we wait and hope that we'll catch something. This is the first clear CME for IRIS so the team is very excited."

The IRIS imagery focuses in on material of 30,000 kelvins at the base, or foot points, of the CME. The line moving across the middle of the movie is the entrance slit for IRIS's spectrograph,....


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-05-nasa-iris-gigantic-eruption-solar.html#jCp

Anti-diabetic drug metformin slows aging and lengthens lifespan

A study by Belgian doctoral researcher Wouter De Haes (KU Leuven) and colleagues provides new evidence that metformin, the world's most widely used anti-diabetic drug, slows ageing and increases lifespan.

 In experiments reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers tease out the mechanism behind metformin's age-slowing effects: the drug causes an increase in the number of toxic oxygen molecules released in the cell and this, surprisingly, increases cell robustness and longevity in the long term.

Mitochondria – the energy factories in cells – generate tiny electric currents to provide the body's cells with energy. Highly reactive oxygen molecules are produced as a by-product of this process.

While these molecules are harmful because they can damage proteins and DNA and disrupt normal cell functioning, a small dose can actually do the cell good, say the researchers: "As long as the amount of harmful oxygen molecules released in the cell remains small, it has a positive long-term effect on the cell. Cells use the reactive oxygen particles to their advantage before they can do any damage," explains Wouter De Haes. "Metformin causes a slight increase in the number of harmful oxygen molecules. We found that this makes cells stronger and extends their healthy lifespan."

It was long thought that harmful reactive oxygen molecules were the very cause of ageing. The food and cosmetics industries are quick to emphasise the 'anti-ageing' qualities of products containing antioxidants, such as skin creams, fruit and vegetable juices, red wine and dark chocolate.

But while antioxidants do in fact neutralise harmful reactive oxygen molecules in the cell, they actually negate metformin's anti-ageing effects because the drug relies entirely on these molecules to work.

The researchers studied metformin's mechanism in the tiny roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, an ideal species for studying ageing because it has a lifespan of only three weeks. "As they age, the worms get smaller, wrinkle up and become less mobile. But worms treated with metformin show very limited size loss and no wrinkling. They not only age slower, but they also stay healthier longer," says Wouter De Haes. "While we should be careful not to over-extrapolate our findings to humans, the study is promising as a foundation for future research."

Other studies in humans have shown that metformin suppresses some cancers and heart disease. Metformin could even be an effective drug for counteracting the general effects of ageing, say the researchers.


For more details : http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-06-anti-diabetic-drug-metformin-aging-lengthens.html

Scientists developing electronic skin

 

Once a topic explored exclusively in science fiction, the notion of restoring sensory feelings to humans and to machines is now approaching reality. Scientists around the world are developing artificial organs such as bionic eyes that could potentially restore sensory feelings to the disabled or provide useful sensory capabilities to machines. Now electronic skin is being developed in an attempt to bring a sense of touch to robots and those who wear prosthetics. If the field advances even further, it could even be used in wearable technology As robots become part of our daily lives, electronic skin will be vital. If your robot is going to help you around the house or with medical care, tactile sensing will be a fundamental part of its safe operation. It needs to be able to detect when a surface is slippery as well as sense the shape, texture and temperature of the objects it grasps. If it can sense the properties of that object, the robot can also decide how much force it should apply when it holds it. It is the use of distributed sensors to measure subtle pressure changes that has attracted the attention of wearable technology makers and enthusiasts. Artificial electronic skin, or E-skin has the potential to be used for on-body health monitoring and minimally invasive surgery as well as in robotics and prosthetics. Soft, bendable, stretchy

 

A big breakthrough for electronic skin will come when it can be made soft and bendable like human skin. Soft and comfortable electronic skin would make for a superior ability to handle objects and eliminate much of the inconvenience and discomfort associated with current alternatives. It would also mark a significant step towards its use in wearable technology. But this is a challenge. For the skin to conform to curved surfaces, the electronics need to be bendable and microelectronics technology is at present, essentially flat. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-05-scientists-electronic-skin.html#jCp

Carnegie Mellon prototype shows interface value of smartwatch

The smartwatch is an interesting form factor but a Carnegie Mellon team that is focused on interfaces noted its limitations and addressed the size challenge. Because the device is worn on the wrist, the sophistication of interactions that people can perform on it is limited. The team suggested a workable approach that can make the smartwatch capable of offering enhanced convenience in information access and retrieval. The Carnegie Mellon team came up with a smartwatch that uses the watch face as the multi-degree of freedom interface without having to occlude the screen with fingers.

The smartwatch is an interesting form factor but a Carnegie Mellon team that is focused on interfaces noted its limitations and addressed the size challenge. Because the device is worn on the wrist, the sophistication of interactions that people can perform on it is limited. The team suggested a workable approach that can make the smartwatch capable of offering enhanced convenience in information access and retrieval. The Carnegie Mellon team came up with a smartwatch that uses the watch face as the multi-degree of freedom interface without having to occlude the screen with fingers.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-05-carnegie-mellon-prototype-interface-smartwatch.html#jCp

Toronto team's robotic arm control is all in the mind

This week's attention-getting version of a mind-controlled robotic device comes in the form of an Emotiv EPOC BCI headset controlling a robotic arm with a system smart enough to move the arm using simple movements such as a clenched jaw or wink of the eye. University of Toronto student Ryan Mintz and his team connected an Emotiv EPOC BCI headset to a robotic arm, which responded to the brainwaves captured by the headset. Emotiv EPOC is a high resolution, multi-channel, wireless neuroheadset. The EPOC uses a set of 14 sensors and two references to tune into electric signals produced by the brain to detect a user's thoughts, feelings and expressions in realtime. The EPOC connects wirelessly to most computers. The team designed the system with the hope of contributing to technologies applied to prosthetic limbs.

Read More :http://phys.org/news/2014-05-toronto-team-robotic-arm-mind.html#jCp

Dangerous nitrogen pollution could be halved

The most important fertilizer for producing food is, at the same time, one of the most important risks for human health: nitrogen. Chemical compounds containing reactive nitrogen are major drivers of air and water pollution worldwide, and hence of diseases like asthma or cancer. If no action is taken, nitrogen pollution could rise by 20 percent by 2050 in a middle-of-the-road scenario, according to a study now published by scientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Ambitious mitigation efforts, however, could decrease the pollution by 50 percent. The analysis is the very first to quantify this.

"Nitrogen is an irreplaceable nutrient and a true life-saver as it helps agriculture to feed a growing world population – but it is unfortunately also a dangerous pollutant," says Benjamin Bodirsky, lead-author of the study. In the different forms it can take through chemical reactions, it massively contributes to respirable dust, leads to the formation of aggressive ground-level ozone, and destabilizes water ecosystems. Damages in Europe alone have been estimated at around 1-4 percent of economic output, worth billions of Euro. About half of these nitrogen pollution damages are from agriculture. This is why the scientists ran extensive computer simulations to explore the effects of different mitigation measures.

Both farmers and consumers would have to participate in mitigation

"It became clear that without mitigation the global situation may markedly deteriorate as the global food demand grows," says Bodirsky, who is also affiliated to the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, Colombia (CIAT). "A package of mitigation actions can reverse this trend, yet the risk remains that nitrogen pollution still exceeds safe environmental thresholds."

Only combined mitigation efforts both in food production and consumption could substantially reduce the risks, the study shows. Currently, every second ton of nitrogen put on the fields is not taken up by the crops but blown away by the wind, washed out by rain or decomposed by microorganisms. To reduce losses and prevent pollution, farmers can more carefully target fertilizer application to plants' needs, using soil measurements. Moreover, they should aim at efficiently recycling animal dung to fertilize the plants. "Mitigation costs are currently many times lower than damage costs," says co-author Alexander Popp.

"For consumers in developed countries, halving food waste, meat consumption and related feed use would not only benefit their health and their wallet," Popp adds. "Both changes would also increase the overall resource efficiency of food production and reduce pollution.".......


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-05-dangerous-nitrogen-pollution-halved.html#jCp

10-Foot Sea Level Rise Now Unstoppable Due To Glacier Collapse

water that flows into the Amundsen Sea, is likely already in the process of collapsing, probably irreversibly. A pair of studies show that part of the sheet is melting more quickly than previously thought, and that several of its large glaciers will probably melt into the ocean, raising global sea levels at least 10 feet in the coming centuries. And it cannot be stopped.

The first study, to be published May 16 in the journal Science, suggests that the Thwaites Glacier, a relatively fast-moving part of the ice sheet, will likely melt away into the ocean within several centuries, enough by itself to raise sea levels 2 feet. Another study to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters looked more broadly at Thwaites and other glaciers bordering the Amundsen Sea, and likewise concluded they are collapsing.

The term "collapsing" is perhaps not the best one, because it implies something sudden. These glaciers are expected to melt in the next several centuries, and both studies suggest there is little chance that their runaway melt and slide into the sea will slow down. While not sudden in normal everyday language, it is still quite rapid in geological terms.

A large part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, a massive expanse of frozen
The second study, done in part by NASA researchers, concerns three lines of evidence--collected over the last 40 years--that suggest the glaciers will soon melt away: the changes in their flow speeds, how much of each glacier floats on seawater, and the slope of the terrai they are flowing over and its depth below sea level. Regarding the first, they are flowing more quickly toward sea than before, and this pace is accelerating. Likewise, the amount of floating ice is increasing, and the shape of the sea floor under the ice doesn't appear capable of stopping this increased flow. Specifically, the "grounding line"--where the glaciers cease to lay atop land, and begin rather to float over water, is moving inland quicker than thought, an observation reached by satellite measurements.

Part of the reason this is happening, the researchers think, is because melting makes the ice weigh less, thus causing more of it to float rather than rest on the sea floor. (And as you probably know, floating ice displaces as much water as melted ice.)...

Read More :http://www.popsci.com/article/10-foot-sea-level-rise-now-unstoppable-due-glacier-collapse?src=SOC&dom=fb

Live International Space Station pictures

Check out an amazing view of Earth like we have never seen before.
NASA is streaming pictures from the International Space Station, live and in high definition.
You can even get alerts for when the Station is passing over your home to see if you can spot your backyard.

Check out this amazing rare view of Earth like we have never seen before.

NASA is now streaming pictures from the International Space Station, live and in high definition.

You can get alerts for when the Station is passing over your home to see if you can spot your backyard.

The cameras are part of an experiment to test their ability to transmit and film in harsh environments.

https://au.news.yahoo.com/nsw/a/23337010/spacestation-pictures/?cmp=fb

Coming soon: A brain implant to restore memory

The implantable BrainGate neural interface can detect and record brain signals, allowing persons who have lost the use of arms and legs to have point-and-click control of a computer. A BrainGate device has remained functional for 2.7 years (1,000 days). Credit: Matthew McKee/BrainGate Collaboration

In the next few months, highly secretive US military researchers say they will unveil new advances toward developing a brain implant that could one day restore a wounded soldier's memory.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is forging ahead with a four-year plan to build a sophisticated memory stimulator, as part of President Barack Obama's $100 million initiative to better understand the human brain.
The science has never been done before, and raises ethical questions about whether the human mind should be manipulated in the name of staving off war injuries or managing the aging brain.
Some say those who could benefit include the five million Americans with Alzheimer's disease and the nearly 300,000 US military men and women who have sustained traumatic brain injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"If you have been injured in the line of duty and you can't remember your family, we want to be able to restore those kinds of functions," DARPA program manager Justin Sanchez said this week at a conference in the US capital convened by the Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas.
"We think that we can develop neuroprosthetic devices that can directly interface with the hippocampus, and can restore the first type of memories we are looking at, the declarative memories," he said.
Declarative memories are recollections of people, events, facts and figures, and no research has ever shown they can be put back once they are lost.

 Read more :http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-05-brain-implant-memory.html

Scientists create circuit board modeled on the human brain

Stanford scientists have developed faster, more energy-efficient microchips based on the human brain – 9,000 times faster and using significantly less power than a typical PC. This offers greater possibilities for advances in robotics and a new way of understanding the brain. For instance, a chip as fast and efficient as the human brain could drive prosthetic limbs with the speed and complexity of our own actions.


Stanford scientists have developed a new circuit board modeled on the human brain, possibly opening up new frontiers in robotics and computing.
For all their sophistication, computers pale in comparison to the brain. The modest cortex of the mouse, for instance, operates 9,000 times faster than a personal computer simulation of its functions.
Not only is the PC slower, it takes 40,000 times more power to run, writes Kwabena Boahen, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford, in an article for the Proceedings of the IEEE.

"From a pure energy perspective, the brain is hard to match," says Boahen, whose article surveys how "neuromorphic" researchers in the United States and Europe are using silicon and software to build electronic systems that mimic neurons and synapses.
Boahen and his team have developed Neurogrid, a circuit board consisting of 16 custom-designed "Neurocore" chips. Together these 16 chips can simulate 1 million neurons and billions of synaptic connections. The team designed these chips with power efficiency in mind. Their strategy was to enable certain synapses to share hardware circuits. The result was Neurogrid – a device about the size of an iPad that can simulate orders of magnitude more neurons and synapses than other brain mimics on the power it takes to run a tablet computer.
The National Institutes of Health funded development of this million-neuron prototype with a five-year Pioneer Award. Now Boahen stands ready for the next steps – lowering costs and creating compiler software that would enable engineers and computer scientists with no knowledge of neuroscience to solve problems – such as controlling a humanoid robot – using Neurogrid.

Its speed and low power characteristics make Neurogrid ideal for more than just modeling the human brain. Boahen is working with other Stanford scientists to develop prosthetic limbs for paralyzed people that would be controlled by a Neurocore-like chip.











"Right now, you have to know how the brain works to program one of these," said Boahen, gesturing at the $40,000 prototype board on the desk of his Stanford office. "We want to create a neurocompiler so that you would not need to know anything about synapses and neurons to able to use one of these."



Brain ferment

In his article, Boahen notes the larger context of neuromorphic research, including the European Union's Human Brain Project, which aims to simulate a human brain on a supercomputer. By contrast, the U.S. BRAIN Project – short for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies – has taken a tool-building approach by challenging scientists, including many at Stanford, to develop new kinds of tools that can read out the activity of thousands or even millions of neurons in the brain as well as write in complex patterns of activity.
Zooming from the big picture, Boahen's article focuses on two projects comparable to Neurogrid that attempt to model brain functions in silicon and/or software.
One of these efforts is IBM's SyNAPSE Project – short for Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics. As the name implies, SyNAPSE involves a bid to redesign chips, code-named Golden Gate, to emulate the ability of neurons to make a great many synaptic connections – a feature that helps the brain solve problems on the fly. At present a Golden Gate chip consists of 256 digital neurons each equipped with 1,024 digital synaptic circuits, with IBM on track to greatly increase the numbers of neurons in the system.
Heidelberg University's BrainScales project has the ambitious goal of developing analog chips to mimic the behaviors of neurons and synapses. Their HICANN chip – short for High Input Count Analog Neural Network – would be the core of a system designed to accelerate brain simulations, to enable researchers to model drug interactions that might take months to play out in a compressed time frame. At present, the HICANN system can emulate 512 neurons each equipped with 224 synaptic circuits, with a roadmap to greatly expand that hardware base.
Each of these research teams has made different technical choices, such as whether to dedicate each hardware circuit to modeling a single neural element (e.g., a single synapse) or several (e.g., by activating the hardware circuit twice to model the effect of two active synapses). These choices have resulted in different trade-offs in terms of capability and performance.
In his analysis, Boahen creates a single metric to account for total system cost – including the size of the chip, how many neurons it simulates and the power it consumes.

Neurogrid was by far the most cost-effective way to simulate neurons, in keeping with Boahen's goal of creating a system affordable enough to be widely used in research.

Speed and efficiency

But much work lies ahead. Each of the current million-neuron Neurogrid circuit boards cost about $40,000. Boahen believes dramatic cost reductions are possible. Neurogrid is based on 16 Neurocores, each of which supports 65,536 neurons. Those chips were made using 15-year-old fabrication technologies.
By switching to modern manufacturing processes and fabricating the chips in large volumes, he could cut a Neurocore's cost 100-fold – suggesting a million-neuron board for $400 a copy. With that cheaper hardware and compiler software to make it easy to configure, these neuromorphic systems could find numerous applications.

For instance, a chip as fast and efficient as the human brain could drive prosthetic limbs with the speed and complexity of our own actions – but without being tethered to a power source. Krishna Shenoy, an electrical engineering professor at Stanford and Boahen's neighbor at the interdisciplinary Bio-X center, is developing ways of reading brain signals to understand movement. Boahen envisions a Neurocore-like chip that could be implanted in a paralyzed person's brain, interpreting those intended movements and translating them to commands for prosthetic limbs without overheating the brain.
A small prosthetic arm in Boahen's lab is currently controlled by Neurogrid to execute movement commands in real time. For now it doesn't look like much, but its simple levers and joints hold hope for robotic limbs of the future.
Of course, all of these neuromorphic efforts are beggared by the complexity and efficiency of the human brain.

In his article, Boahen notes that Neurogrid is about 100,000 times more energy efficient than a personal computer simulation of 1 million neurons. Yet it is an energy hog compared to our biological CPU.
"The human brain, with 80,000 times more neurons than Neurogrid, consumes only three times as much power," Boahen writes. "Achieving this level of energy efficiency while offering greater configurability and scale is the ultimate challenge neuromorphic engineers face."

http://phys.org/news/2014-04-scientists-circuit-board-human-brain.html#jCp