Brain tissue cultured from rats has controlled a wheeled robot around a lab, according to New Scientist this week (video). Researchers in the UK have harnessed signals from thousands of disembodied rat neurons, and manipulated them to get a robot to respond to instructions.This is no ordinary robot control system - a plain old microchip connected to a circuit board. Instead, the controller nestles inside a small pot containing a pink broth of nutrients and antibiotics. Inside that pot, some 300,000 rat neurons have made - and continue to make - connections with each other. As they do so, the disembodied neurons are communicating, sending electrical signals to one another just as they do in a living creature.
The team at the University of Reading in the UK hope their research will help provide treatments for diseases like Alzheimer’s and epilepsy.
