Epileptic teen plays video games with chip in his head:

The teenager had a grid atop his brain to record brain surface signals, a brain-machine interface technique that uses electrocorticographic (ECoG) activity - data taken invasively right from the brain surface. It is an alternative to a frequently used technique to study humans called electroencephalographic activity (EEG) - data taken non-invasively by electrodes outside the brain on the scalp. Engineers programmed the Atari software to interface with the brain-machine interface system.

Eric C. Leuthardt, M.D., an assistant professor of neurological surgery at the School of Medicine, and Daniel Moran, Ph.D., assistant professor of biomedical engineering, performed their research on the boy who had the grids implanted so that neurologists and neurosurgeons can find the area in the brain serving as the focus for an epileptic seizure, with hopes of removing it to avoid future seizures. To do this, the boy and his doctors, Dr Mathew Smyth and Dr John Zempel, had to wait for a seizure.

With approval of the patient and his parents and the Washington University School of Medicine Institutional Review Board, Leuthardt and Moran connected the patient to a sophisticated computer running a special program known as BCI2000 (developed by their collaborator Gerwin Schalk at the Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health in Albany) which involves a video game that is linked to the ECoG grid. They then asked the boy to do various motor and speech tasks, moving his hands various ways, talking, and imagining. The team could see from the data which parts of the brain and what brain signals correlate to these movements. They then asked the boy to play a simple, two-dimensional Space Invaders game by actually moving his tongue and hand. He was then asked to imagine the same movements, but not to actually perform them with his hands or tongue. When he saw the cursor in the video game, he then controlled it with his brain.

"He cleared out the whole level one basically on brain control," said Leuthardt. "He learned almost instantaneously. We then gave him a more challenging version in two-dimensions and he mastered two levels there playing only with his imagination."

That's COOL.

My brains are about to leak out my ears.

Years from now, after the original designers are dead and the rest of us are merrily ignoring the years we spent here, researchers will curse those who came up with this data schema. I've been cursing them since I started here. But if someone ever gets these databases cold, they are so screwed. Predictions of planets colliding might be buried in the depths, but it will be impossible to discover.

I hear you, sarameg. A well-designed data structure is an elegant thing, which immensely helps both present and future programmers and analysts. If only management would put a priority on giving design enough time to get things set up correctly....

The main problem is that they let the scientists go to town on the kind of data products they wanted. Which they did, breaking all sorts of rules our end had laid out. And in that era, it was the scientists who were golden, so our end just had to deal. The result is 23ish terabytes of data traced in a snarly, obscure, bizarro-world database. Or rather, databases. It's really bad.

Is it possible to be allergic to envelope glue?

It is if you're on Seinfeld.

cheap invites?

If it's the end of the day, it's time for picture posting! Today, instead of puppies or kittens, it's a great shot of the Chicago grid at night.

Timelies all!

It's not a whole lot of fun when a piece of equipment you need for your protocol at work malfunctions in the middle of said protocol. To make matters more annoying, it's the only piece of equipment in the lab that works for this. Grrr.