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posted by janrinok on Saturday October 15 2016, @03:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the spreading-their-net dept.

In a basement laboratory at Harvard University, a few strands of thin wire mesh are undulating at the bottom of a cup of water, as if in a minuscule ribbon dance. The meshes—about the length of a pen cap—are able to do something unprecedented: once injected into the brain of a living mouse, they can safely stimulate individual neurons and measure the cells' behavior for more than a year.

Electronic brain interfaces like these could someday be crucial for people with neurological diseases such as Parkinson's. The disease causes a group of neurons in one area of the brain to begin dying off, triggering uncontrollable tremors and shakes. Sending targeted electrical jolts to this area can help whip the living neurons back into shape and stop Parkinson's symptoms.

Today people can undergo an electrical treatment called deep brain stimulation. But it has big limitations. It involves implanting rigid, dense electrodes in the brain. That's far from ideal in such a soft organ: after about four weeks, scar tissue begins to build up. The only way to get the electrodes to work through this tissue is to keep upping the voltage used to excite the neurons. That can be dangerous, and sometimes another surgery is required to replace the implant.

If you've had a hankering for a classic, "I for one welcome our ______ overlords," joke, this story is for you.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday October 15 2016, @03:55AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday October 15 2016, @03:55AM (#414519)

    Current DBS tech is crude like performing brain surgery with a found stone hand axe, but if you're in a hopeless condition - it might actually make things a little better.

    These new nanowires seem like moving one step forward - perhaps sharpening the stone a bit by bashing it on other stones, but not up to the level of polishing the stone into a fine point.

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