The Raelian Movement
for those who are not afraid of the future : http://www.rael.org
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Darpa Wants Remote Controls to Master Troop Minds
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/09/remote-control-minds/
By Katie Drummond Email Author
September 9, 2010
The Pentagon's blue-sky research arm wants to trick out troops'
brains, from the areas that regulate alertness and cognition to pain
treatment and psychiatric well-being. And the scientists want to do it
all from the outside in — with a gadget installed inside the troops'
helmets. "Remote Control of Brain Activity Using Ultrasound," the
Defense Department's Armed with Science blog promises.
It's the latest out-there project in the military's growing arsenal of
brain-based research. In recent months alone, the Pentagon's funded
projects to optimize troop's minds, prevent injuries and even
preemptively assess cognitive ability and vulnerability to traumatic
stress. Now, Darpa's funding one lab that's trying to do it all — from
boosting troop smarts to preventing traumatic brain injuries.
Arizona State University neuroscientist William Tyler has been working
with funding from the Army Research Laboratory for years. That
neurotechnology work has now caught the eye of Darpa, which awarded
his lab a Young Faculty Award to improve upon non-invasive approaches
to brain stimulation.
"When people ask what this kind of device could do, I ask them what
their brain does for them," Tyler tells Danger Room. "The brain serves
all the functions of your body, and if you knew the neuroanatomy, then
you can start to regulate each one of those functions."
Already, scientists have devised cutting-edge brain stimulation
methods to treat medical disorders, like Parkinson's disease or severe
depression. But current deep-brain approaches require invasive surgery
to implant electrodes and batteries, and external ultrasound
stimulation can't penetrate "the deep brain circuits where many
diseased circuits reside," Tyler writes at Armed With Science.
Now, Tyler and his research team have created a "transcranial pulsed
ultrasound" that's able to stimulate a myriad of brain circuits from
the outside in. The device has already proven capable of targeting
deep brain regions, unlike existing methods. And it's capable of
zeroing in on extremely specific brain zones, as small as two or three
millimeters. Plus, prototype devices are small enough to be fitted
inside a typical helmet.
"Going deep beneath the skull and having extremely specific spatial
resolution are two huge advantages over existing approaches," Tyler
says. "Depth and specificity are what allow the ultrasound to do what
other methods can't."
With Darpa's funding, Tyler plans to expand the uses of the ultrasound
and improve the device's spacial resolution even more, making it a
veritable all-in-one brain stimulation device. Using a microcontroller
device, the ultrasound would stimulate different brain regions to
boost troop alertness and cognition, relieve stress and pain, and
protect them against traumatic brain injuries.
"The really damaging part of a TBI isn't the initial injury," Tyler
says. "It's the metabolic damage, the free radicals and the swelling
that are happening in the hours afterward. If you can flick your
remote and trigger an immediate intervention, you'd be curbing what
might otherwise be lifelong brain damage."
Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/09/remote-control-minds/#ixzz11Tv5ZQtY
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"Ethics" is simply a last-gasp attempt by deist conservatives and
orthodox dogmatics to keep humanity in ignorance and obscurantism,
through the well tried fermentation of fear, the fear of science and
new technologies.
There is nothing glorious about what our ancestors call history,
it is simply a succession of mistakes, intolerances and violations.
On the contrary, let us embrace Science and the new technologies
unfettered, for it is these which will liberate mankind from the
myth of god, and free us from our age old fears, from disease,
death and the sweat of labour.
Rael
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