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NANOTECHNOLOGY
Electronic mesh has potential to unravel workings of mammalian brain.
A simple injection is now all it takes to wire up a brain. A diverse team of physicists, neuroscientists and chemists has implanted mouse brains with a rolled-up, silky mesh studded with tiny electronic devices, and shown that it unfurls to spy on and stimulate individual neurons.
The implant has the potential to unravel the workings of the mammalian brain in unprecedented detail. "I think it's great, a very creative new approach to the problem of recording from large number of neurons in the brain," says Rafael Yuste, director of the Neurotechnology Center at Columbia University in New York, who was not involved in the work.
If eventually shown to be safe, the soft mesh might even be used in humans to treat conditions such as Parkinson's disease, says Charles Lieber, a chemist at Harvard University on Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the team. The work was published in Nature Nanotechnology on 8 June1.
Neuroscientists still do not understand how the activities of individual brain cells translate to higher cognitive powers such as perception and emotion. The problem has spurred a hunt for technologies that will allow scientists to study thousands, or ideally millions, of neurons at once, but the use of brain implants is currently limited by several disadvantages....