Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 13, Page 50

I've asked my webcomic author peers to say something nice about A*, in return for which I'll link to their own comic when I post the quote, so that's what's going on up there. Response so far has actually been quite good, so this could go on for a while. Hopefully this little indulgence of mine won't be too annoying, but you just might find a link to a nifty webcomic you hadn't seen before!

And just to prove this won't distract me from my usual tumultuous forays into science news and beyond, here's a bunch of stuff!

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I came across a NewScientist.com article highlighting a black hole simulation program that shows how the hole's gravity would bend light around itself, distorting the view of distant stars. You can even download the program, written by two fellows from the University of Stuttgart. I couldn't seem to get its OpenGL renderer to work on my computer, drat the luck.

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Innovation News Daily ran an article recently about the Navy's test of their "Maritime Laser Demonstrator," a ship-mounted prototype of a laser weapon. It isn't all that powerful, but in the tests they've been able to use it to burn through outboard motors after a second or two, as is supposedly shown in this video:



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It isn't just the Navy shooting lasers these days, though--even green fluorescent protein ("GFP") is getting into the act, according to this LiveScience.com article: scientists working at Massachusetts General Hospital, it says, using genetically engineered kidney cells containing the protein (which normally occurs in some fluorescent sea creatures) and a pair of tiny mirrors to generate a laser from the green light the protein emits.

They came up with the idea because GFP emits its light along very specific wavelengths, which is exactly what you need a laser to do! So they were able to use the tiny mirrors to gather the light emitted by the protein, and focus it into a beam, albeit a pretty weak one.

Neat! Now they've just got to move that from kidneys to something a little more accessible, like say fingertips or eyeballs, and we'll be in business! Or at least, we'll have some cool natural super-hero special effects. :P And maybe the Navy could harness herds of fluorescent jellyfish to take out pirate speedboats!

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 13, Page 51

This Space.com article informed me that there's a new telescope on the scene: ESO's VLT Survey Telescope ("VST"), in the high Chilean desert right next to the VLT ("Very Large Telescope") that I mentioned and showed a picture of just recently.

The VST's light-gathering mirror isn't all that big by big telescope standards--just 2.65 meters across, vs for instance the four 8.2 meter mirrors of the VLT (or the 100 meter mirror of the ESO's proposed Overwhelmingly Large Telescope, which was however cancelled in favor of the less overwhelmingly expensive 42 meter European Extremely Large Telescope, scheduled for completion in 2018 (no, I am not making these names up! :P)), but it has a wide aperture and a powerful camera (the "OmegaCAM," dun-dun-dunnnn), perfect for sweeping the sky and taking large-scale photographic surveys of space--and of the galactic band of the Milky Way in particular, including A*. :)

So that's neat. Here's an informative video about the VST, with pleasant background music. But enough talk, let's see what it can do!

To show it off, the ESO released two pictures, each of an object so large in the sky that it can't be captured in a single image by other large telescopes, such as Hubble, even though Hubble's view is far sharper. Let's compare!

Here's the VST's view of the Omega Nebula, aka the "Swan Nebula," or Messier 17 ("M17"), a cloud of hot, star-forming gas somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 light years from Earth (isn't it interesting that they haven't really been able to nail down its precise distance yet?), in the direction of the galactic core. The nebula is 15 light years across, an estimated 800 solar masses, and sits in a cloud of material that's about 40 light years in diameter.


image by ESO/INAF-VST/OmegaCAM (source)

And here's Hubble's view of the same nebula:


image by NASA (source)

So, the VST is good for seeing it all in one go! The second released VST image is of the globular cluster Omega Centauri, the largest and brightest star cluster in the Milky Way, and the second largest star cluster in our local group of galaxies; it was so bright that Ptolemy was able to spot it, over 2000 years ago--he thought it was a star. Omega Centauri, 15,800 light years from Earth, is about 12 billion years old, and contains several million stars (5 million solar masses), the ones in the center averaging less than 0.1 light years apart.


image by ESO/INAF-VST/OmegaCAM (source)

And Hubble's view:


image by NASA (source)

~~~~~~~~

Interestingly, when I first posted about Omega Centauri over here on the A* forum (warning: high bandwidth, although there's a maybe even better photo of the cluster there, taken by telescope at a different ESO observatory in Chile), it was thought that there might be an intermediate-mass black hole of about 4000 solar masses at the center--this was based on readings that seemed to indicate the stars at the center of the cluster were moving faster than those farther out. Subsequent observation, however, has found that star density and speed do not vary significantly at the center, and if there is a black hole there, it must be a much smaller one, maybe no more than 1,200 solar masses. NASA and the ESA even put together a graphic showing the calculated star movements at the core of the cluster; the photo is from October 2010 with Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3, and the motions were calculated by comparing the positions of the same stars as seen in Hubble photos of the cluster from 2002 and 2006; each streak shows the star's predicted motion over the next 600 years, composed of dots 30 years apart:


image by NASA, ESA, J. Anderson and R. van der Marel (STScI) (source)

So as you can see, it seems that the stars are moving in random directions, rather than in tight orbits around a central mass; contrast that with the observed motions of stars at the center of our galaxy, around A*, where the stars at the very center are packed as close as light-days apart, and are moving very quickly in tight orbits around a central object: the theorized supermassive black hole A*!

(The ESO, or European Southern Observatory--the organization of fourteen European nations, and Brazil, that runs these vast observatories in Chile and other southern hemisphere locations--should not be confused with the ESA, or European Space Agency, comprised of many of the same nations, but focused on spaceflight rather than ground-based telescopic observation. I'm mentioning this only because I had them a little confused in my head. :P)

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 13, Page 52

An alert reader on Facebook pointed out a new Swift/Chandra discovery of a relatively nearby galaxy with two supermassive black holes merging at the center, the result of two galaxies colliding.

It's been known for a while that the galaxy Markarian 739, or NGC 3758, which is about 425 million light years away, had two galactic cores, one of which was an active galactic nucleus, where a supermassive black hole was actively swallowing vast amounts of material. But it wasn't until Chandra's X-ray vision took a good hard look at it that scientists realized that the second core was also active--a second feeding supermassive black hole in one galaxy!

Here they are in visible light:


image by NASA/SDSS (source)

The two supermassive black holes--the bright spots at the center of above image--are about 11,000 light years apart.

Indeed, this type of thing doesn't seem to be all that rare; the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) on Swift has been mapping X-ray sources, detecting active galactic nuclei ("AGN") within 650 million light years, and a study published last year showed that about a quarter of the AGN it has found were either interacting or paired off, with about 60% of them predicted to merge within the next billion years.

Here's a movie about Swift's search for AGN, and here's a movie about Markarian 739's pair of supermassive black holes.

The Swift movie mentions that deep space X-ray studies indicate galaxy mergers--the source of active galactic nuclei, which are themselves the primary source of deep space X-rays--were much more common in the early universe, and probably peaked around 7 billion years ago. Swift has been finding so many AGN that they may be able to account for the cosmic X-ray background seen throughout the visible universe.

Markarian 739 is the *second* twin active supermassive black hole galaxy found, and the second closest; the record for those goes to NGC 6240, about 400 million light years away. Here it is in visible light as seen by Hubble:


image by NASA (source)

and in X-rays by Chandra (superimposed on a visible light image in yellow), where the two active supermassive black holes at the center are revealed:


image by NASA (source)

Oh! And I just realized I posted a composite of those two on the forum over a year ago (the nice thing about having a bad memory is that everything old is new again!):


image by NASA (source)

It doesn't do to underestimate the number of black holes out there!

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 13, Page 53

You know, I tried--*tried*--to resist drawing Selenis in a black suit--all my storyboards for this episode have her in white--but earlier this week I realized that the drawings of her in her white suit that have been most successful have been the ones where I was using what I guess you could generously call tricks of lighting to make the suit effectively black, for instance in page 39 and page 44. And I'm sure this has nothing at all to do with the years I spent in my previous job, writing and role-playing a female Agent in a dark suit (among other characters) in "The Matrix Online." *cough* Anyway I think black is just her color and that's all there is to it. :P It was time for a costume change, anyway.

~~~~~

Getting back to the discussion of supermassive black holes in the earlier universe from yesterday, a recent analysis of Chandra readings of even older X-rays--these being X-rays emitted just 800 million years after the Big Bang--has concluded that there were many more supermassive black holes, in the X-ray-visible-form of active galactic nuclei, than had previously been thought in the early billions of years of our universe's history: at least 30 million supermassive black holes at that time, which is 10,000 times more than had been previously thought.

Here's the "Chandra Deep Field South" image that helped illustrate that impressive conclusion; it combines Chandra's X-ray view (blue) of those early galaxies with optical (green and blue) and infrared (red and green) views from Hubble:


image by NASA (source)

It's actually a bit of a confusing illustration, as the 12-billion-year-old galaxies Chandra was examining are faint reddish dots you can barely see in that image, except for the ones with active supermassive black holes giving off X-rays, which are in Chandra's bright blue. I think. They think that they weren't able to see the active nuclei at the centers of so many of those galaxies in visible or infrared light because they were obscured in gas and dust, but X-rays cut right through that stuff, so Chandra's X-ray vision could find many more of these ancient supermassive black holes than other instruments had in the past.

So yet again, more supermassive black holes than anyone had thought existed! And somehow I bet these aren't the last breakthroughs that will find significantly more supermassive black holes around the universe than we'd thought--heck, these are the easy, bright ones they're finding, anyway. What I really want to know is, how many *quiet* ones are there, just lurking out all alone in intergalactic space, each one hiding the mass of millions or billions of stars?

Remember that the largest supermassive black hole known to a reasonable degree of certitude (I think) is the one in M87, a black hole of an estimated 6.6 billion solar masses; I posted a bunch about M87 on the forum here a while back, including photos showing its famous 5000-light-year-long jet, shooting out of that super-duper-massive black hole. Here's a Chandra image of it that I didn't post before, though: it shows the hot, X-ray emitting gas in the cluster of galaxies around M87, in blue, being blown away by energetic particles (in red, detected by radio telescopes) emitting from the intense reactions around the 6.6 billion solar mass black hole at M87's center:


image by: X-ray: NASA/CXC/KIPAC/N. Werner et al Radio: NSF/NRAO/AUI/W. Cotton (source)

So giant black holes like that are pretty easy to find--hard to miss, really--but there must be plenty with no gas around them: nothing to react with, and thus emitting negligible energy--almost totally invisible! Gravitational lensing has been used to try to find quiet black holes, and even much smaller things like planets, but I don't think it's been used to search for silent intergalactic black holes on a really large scale yet.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 13, Page 54

Having said yesterday that M87 was the galaxy boasting the largest supermassive black hole (6.6 billion Suns worth of mass) that we're fairly confident of knowing with some accuracy, I went looking after that for what the very largest known is supposed to be, and that search came up with the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy OJ 287, at the significant distance of 3.5 billion light years from Earth (M87 is a relatively nearby 53 million light years distant). OJ 287's central black hole has been calculated at 18 billion solar masses; and as if just to emphasize how ridiculously massive that is, fluctuations in its signal have been interpreted to be caused by ANOTHER supermassive black hole orbiting it so closely that it is punching through OJ 287's accretion disk as it goes around and around; that little half of this supposed supermassive binary is a *mere* 100 million solar masses (that's 25 times the size of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy), and it is projected to be swallowed by the 18 billion solar masses black hole in the brief time span of just 10,000 years.

The accuracy of this data has been called into question, though, so who knows. But it does make for an interesting mental image to ponder! And if you'd like it dramatically animated for you, it's covered in this video, which, while going a little too heavy on the CG animation, haunting music, dramatic reading, and zooming and rotating in on still photos you could just find by themselves on the Internet--these things indeed seem to be be almost inescapable in astrophysics videos aimed at the general public--is actually rather good, and has some quite interesting simulations, visualizations, and descriptions of the formation of supermassive black holes in the early universe:



And looking through that series, I found they also have a whole episode about A*! And it even has some info I didn't know about before, such as K. G. Jansky's discovery, published to some fanfare in the New York Times in 1933, of a radio source coming from the center of the galaxy, in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. Jansky discovered the source with his own large antenna, which in effect became the first radio telescope--and this was all done as part of his work for Bell Labs, who wanted to find the sources of static that could interfere with that fascinating new technology, radio broadcasting!

So that was how A* was first detected, although they didn't know what it was at the time. Another thing from the video that I don't think I knew, although it sounds slightly familiar somehow, is a calculation that there are 20,000 black holes within the central three light years of our galaxy; although, given that we have a very difficult time identifying non-supermassive black holes with any degree of certainty, much less those tens of thousands of light years away, and obscured by a lot of gas and dust, I'd sure like to know how someone arrived at that figure.

Anyhow it's probably the best popular science video on A* I've seen. Here it is:

I think Mr. Adrian is just about to make a mistake of his career {if not life} upon the 'Communication' that his new assist is MOST familiar with!

Selenis... the 'cure' for workplace sexual harassment! LOL!

But good communication in the workplace is so important!

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 13, Page 55

An April BBC article (yes I'm kind of behind in my news queue...need to close some of these tabs I've been keeping open! :P) says that auroral activity on Saturn has been linked to the planet's small moon Enceladus, and specifically to the salty ice particles Enceladus' geysers shoot out into space--ions in this material end up forming an electrical circuit with Saturn, connecting at Saturn's poles, where they cause the visual effect of an aurora.

I posted about aurorae on Jupiter and Saturn on the A* forum before (Jupiter's aurorae have been attributed to three of its moons), including this nice old Hubble ultraviolet photo of Saturn's polar lights:


image by NASA (source)

I've also posted on the A* forum about Enceladus before, so handily enough I already have a few photos illustrating its icy activity; for instance, here's the 500 km moon going through the ice crystals it has left in the path of its own orbit


image by NASA (source)

and then we have a nice dramatic wide shot of some of its ice geyser activity:


image by NASA (source)

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And staying in the theme of following up on stuff I've written a bit about before, you may recall that back at the end of May I wrote about an unusually large, unusually powerful gamma ray burst picked up by the Swift satellite:


image by NASA (source)

The thinking at the time was that all that energy probably resulted from a star being pulled into a large black hole, and according to this recent article, that has now been confirmed, and the source galaxy identified as "a small galaxy in the Draco constellation, some 3.8 billion light-years away." So that galaxy's central supermassive black hole sucked in a star; gravitational, electromagnetic, and who knows what other forces tore it apart as it fell into the hole; and the hole's magnetic field channeled much of the resulting energy into beams shooting out from the poles of the supermassive black hole--and we just happened to be in the way of one of them, 3.8 billion years later.

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And then there was the announcement last week that Iran had launched its second satellite, "Rasad," meaning "observation," into orbit, supposedly to take photos for high-resolution maps of Earth. Their first satellite launch, "Omid," took place in 2009; and last year, they claimed to have "launched a rocket carrying a mouse, turtle, and worms into space."

Good on them, I suppose (less good for the mouse, turtle, and worms; of course you'd think if they do have a good camera up in space they'll have lots of things they'll be using it to peer into in oh say the United States, but hey we do the same to them--and to animals with one-way tickets to space), although when the announcement comes via their state TV, beginning with a phrase like "our glorious scientists," and with no external source being able to confirm such launches, you kind of wonder a bit. But here's hoping they are coming closer to space exploration, and to the international scientific cooperation that almost inevitably goes along with it.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 13, Page 56

I made a new little button icon for A*!



Innit cute? You can use it...well, wherever you like, if you want. *I'm* using it for a new advertising campaign, whee!

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I call A* "hard" science fiction, and exactly what that means sometimes varies by interpretation, but here I generally mean that it restricts itself to things that could happen without violating scientifically established laws of the known universe. So you won't see faster-than-light travel or handheld death rays here, for instance.

Those are just the easy, obvious ones to avoid, though. Sometimes I get a little nervous about more marginal things--things that maybe don't outright break the laws of science as we know them, but that make you wonder "would that *really* be possible, even given centuries of technological advance?" Or at least, sometimes they make me wonder about it.

Fortunately, sometimes it turns out that I may have guessed right. One thing I was worrying about along hard science lines, you see, were Selenis' neural implants; you could be forgiven for not realizing she has such bionic-woman-sounding things, since I haven't emphasized them unduly; maybe the closest I came was Solvan Mar admiring her "neuro implants" (not sure why I had him say it with quite that spelling now, hm) back in episode 11, after he'd just seen her shoot a man ambushing her from behind, without even looking at him. Later in that same scene, she hints that she may have used them to tell if Mar was lying to her, calling them "my sensors." And it may not have been obvious, but moments later, she used them yet again, to know when the man behind her, whom she had shot earlier, was reviving, and then turning to fire at her.

And of course she uses some sort of implant simply to "talk" to her managing computer program, which she calls "mother," without moving her lips--and, similarly, to hear Mother talking to her.

So I got to wondering... Implanted sensors? Meaningful artificial stimulation of inner sensory receptors? Have I gone too far, or could that stuff actually happen?

Well, once I ask myself that kind of question I just can't sleep until I've solved it, so of course I went trolling around Wikipedia to see what I could turn up. And fortunately, it appears that I didn't go too far from the conceivably possible with these things.

Let's take the relatively simple example of Mother talking into Selenis' head. In a way, I'd like to think that that's a direct radio transmission of (compressed and encrypted, of course) text to a receiver in Selenis' head that unscrambles it, converts it into the equivalent brainwave pattern that comprehends those words, and zaps that directly into Selenis' brain synapses. Which I think is probably within the realm of possibility--but for now let's keep it simple; let's say Mother's speech is translated into sound waves--text to speech, you can do that on Google Translate right now! (or any of umpteen other places on the Internet, but the Google one has a lot of language options, and I get oh so simply amused by the way their English voice translation renders naughty words :P)--and these are sent--we don't want to do this with a tiny speaker in Selenis' inner ear or something, mind you, since that could potentially be overheard by listening devices--by electrical impulse directly into the nerves Selenis uses for hearing. Could that work?

Apparently it could, because over 150,000 people here on Earth already have such a "neural implant"--that's my silly phrase, mind you; these very real implants are called cochlear implants, and they use a tiny microphone to pick up external sounds, which are then run through a speech processor to isolate the parts that are probably audible speech, and translate those into electrical impulse patterns comprehensible to the nervous system; those are then sent into the body, down a wire to electrodes running into the wearer's cochlea, the auditory portion of the inner ear; the pulsating electrical field produced there by the electrodes stimulates the user's auditory--or "cochlear"--nerve, which passes the signal along into the brain, where it is re-interpreted as sound.

Here's a diagram of the internal and external parts of a typical cochlear implant:


image by National Institutes of Health (source)

and here's what the surgically implanted portion of one type looks like on its own:


image by Edwtie (source)

And here's a simulation of what speech might "sound" like through a cochlear implant. Spooky!

So I think we're well covered as far as Mother speaking straight into Selenis' head goes. As for Selenis speaking back, and doing other things with those "neural implants," that gets a little more complicated, and I will save that for...maybe next time! It gets into neuroscience, you know (ohh, *that's* probably where I got that "neuro" spelling from...hm I guess that's okay then :P), which has quite a few unsolved problems--a breeding ground and potentially deadly minefield for all sorts of "hard" sci-fi ideas! (I suppose there are probably brands of hard science fiction that only consider stuff that has definitely been proven to work--that doesn't really leave enough room for the fun "fiction" part of it though, if you ask me. :P)

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And I'm just going to sneak something in here that I stumbled across in looking through some of this stuff: the mirror box. It's a simple mirror trick, but it can, apparently, be used to cure or at least reduce phantom limb pain in people who have lost a limb, particularly if it was paralyzed before removal. The theory goes that when it was paralyzed, the victim tried to move it, and received sensory feedback that it didn't move. This sense of being unable to move the paralyzed limb stamps itself into the brain, but then, if phantom nerve sensations after amputation tell the person that the (missing) arm is in a painful position, they're still convinced that they're unable to move it, even in phantom form, and the pain continues as a phantom cramp.

So! The mirror box:


image by Phidauex (source)

The user sticks their good hand into the side with the mirror, and the stump of the other (or maybe just as much as they imagine of it?) into the other side, and then they look at the reflected image of the good hand; mirrored, it now looks like the *other,* missing hand, and in some cases the user is then able mentally to unclench or reposition the phantom limb to a more comfortable phantom position, easing the phantom limb pain.

Neuroscience is pretty crazy stuff sometimes.

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Oh, and I forgot to mention that the pioneering research that eventually led to cochlear devices was a stunt way back in 1790 by Alessandro Volta, the Italian physicist who a decade later would invent the battery: he "placed metal rods in his own ears and connected them to a 50-volt circuit, experiencing a jolt and hearing a noise 'like a thick boiling soup.'" Eek! Well, I hear a buzzing inside my ear when there's no other sound around, but I think that's just because I listened to music too loud or something...and it certainly didn't lead me to the discovery that electrical stimulation of the auditory system can produce the perception of sound, like Volta's trick with the rods did.

Although now I wonder if that did leave him with a buzzing sound. :P

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 13, Page 57

Yesterday I talked about how Mother's digitized voice speaking directly into Selenis' head could work, and related it to the current real technology of cochlear implants, which create the sensation of hearing with electrical impulses applied directly to appropriate parts of the nervous system.

What about some of the other things Selenis' neural implants seem to do, though? As I mentioned yesterday, some of the things she has done in the comic suggest she has implants enhancing her vision--giving her eyes in the back of her head, as it were--and perhaps additional sensors capable of monitoring, for instance, specific vital signs of nearby individuals. One could imagine that these implants might give her feedback by creating "visual" displays directly in her brain, perhaps; I've tried to avoid drawing pages from her point of view with some sort of implant-generated visual overlays because that's been overdone in film and so forth to the point of being tacky--in any case it might be nicer to imagine a rather more elegant solution where the implant data is converted directly into thought, so she just "knows" something without having to re-interpret it from simulated visual data.

But like we did yesterday, let's start with the simple case: is it feasible that artificial signals could create the sensation of vision?

According to Wikipedia's "brain-computer interface" page, the answer is "yes"; in fact experiments with that sort of thing go back to the 70's. In 1978, for instance, a prototype implant connected to a blinded man's visual cortex succeeded in producing the sensation of seeing light; the subject could only see shades of gray, and had to be connected to a two-ton mainframe, but that has now been reduced to a portable device, and since at least 2002, the resolution of the simulated vision has improved to the point where an otherwise blind user is able to drive a car around a parking lot.

In 1999, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley were able to reverse the process: working with cats, by reading electrical signals from "177 brain cells in the thalamus lateral geniculate nucleus area, which decodes signals from the retina," they were able to decode the firings of the neurons recorded while the cats watched some short films, and reconstruct (albiet in low resolution) scenes and moving objects from the films, using only the data recorded from the brains of the cats.

In 2008, Japanese researchers were able to achieve a similar result with human subjects, and without using implants: using functional magnetic resonance imaging ("fMRI") to map blood flow changes in the cerebral visual cortex as the subjects viewed a series of images, they were able to reconstruct the images using only the recorded fMRI data from the subjects; "while the early results are limited to black and white images of 10x10 squares (pixels), according to the researchers further development of the technology may make it possible to achieve color images, and even view or record dreams."

Now that is significant for Selenis' implants, because as has been mentioned on a few occasions, her cloning system requires sensory transmissions from active clones to be sent back to Mother, where they are deciphered and stored, to be implanted into the next clone as memories. So having them on-hand in digital form, anyway, doesn't seem too unfeasible in light of recent advances in the field.

Not only that, but many experiments, again going back to the 70's, have shown that animal and human brains can learn to control artificial mechanisms through brain signals; I think the one I had in mind when I was coming up with this stuff for Selenis was a (apparently 2008; I thought I remembered one much earlier, maybe not) study where monkeys were able to operate a robotic arm using only their brain. A note on the Wikipedia page says that a Johns Hopkins researcher in the 80's found a "mathematical relationship between the electrical responses of single motor-cortex neurons in rhesus macaque monkeys and the direction that monkeys moved their arms (based on a cosine function)." So there you have it: you need geometry (all right so it was probably more like calculus in this case) for neuroscience, too. Dang.

But isn't it just fascinating that mathematics can be used to encode and decode brain signals? And that we (or really smart people with lots of study and training, anyway) can figure out the math behind the brain's thought codes? We've long taken it for granted that you need math in rocket science and computer programs and so forth, but now real, usable results are coming from applying mathematical functions to brain activity.

There have also been experiments using electroencephalography (reading brain activity without implants, although maybe currently you need a fun apparatus like this:


image by Thuglas (source)

) to control things, like moving cursors on a video screen; implants like the BrainGate


image by PaulWicks (source)

allow for even finer control, where a human brain can move a robotic arm. (But does it come in USB yet? That plug in the photo is a little clunky. :P)

So again, it seems like even things such as Selenis "thinking" words back to Mother--communicating with her computer program simply by forming words in her mind--or controlling functions of her onboard implants--telling an imbedded sensor array to scan Solvan Mar's vital signs, for instance--can't be considered outside the realm of possibility. Neat.

There's one more neuroscientific function of Selenis' technology whose feasibility I want to discuss, and we'll do that tomorrow, although I mentioned it in passing above--can you guess what it is? And I'm particularly excited about it because it just so happened that a day or two ago, a friend of mine on Facebook linked to an article showing what appears to be a significant breakthrough in the field, one whose implications I could only imagine and try to predict when I was coming up with this stuff a year or more ago.