It’s about the size of a milk carton, but a robot being developed by Hong Kong-based innovators could soon prove to be a giant asset for people struggling to lose weight. Dr. Cory Kidd, a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has joined industrial designer Erica Young and scientist Bill McCord to develop a breakthrough robotic health coach, “Autom”. Intuitive Automata’s prototype robot is an interactive personal coach to help dieters track their progress. The little robot is also set to take centre stage as an official promoter for a new animated movie Astro Boy, due to be released next month by Hong Kong’s Imagi Studios.

Google Tech Talks November 21, 2008 ABSTRACT Personal Growth Series: Cracking the Neural Code: Speaking the Language of the Brain with Optics The technological seeds of a Manhattan project-style scientific enterprise, the optical reverse-engineering of brain circuits to crack the neural code, have recently been planted at Stanford. The brain is a high-speed dynamical system consisting of different players that are intertwined and that cannot be separately controlled using conventional methods. For this reason, until recently we have not been able to speak the language of the brain (with millisecond timescale and cell-specific resolution), and in 1979 Francis Crick called for a technology by which all neurons of just one type could be controlled, “leaving the others more or less unaltered”. Tools from the Deisseroth laboratory at Stanford over the past four years have responded to this challenge. These include optical technologies for controlling neural circuits, using precisely-targeted delivery of light energy of different colors that is captured by neurons using nanoscale protein-based antennae, resulting in controlled activity of just the targeted cell types with millisecond precision. Light is delivered by fiberoptics; while light encounters all cell types, only the desired cell type is light-sensitive and responds. Using different optogenetic probes, cells can be turned on or off with millisecond precision and in different combinations. These tools have now been used …
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