Month: March 2014

The EU and the USA to build a brain together

The world's two biggest brain mapping projects are to join forces.  The EU's €1bn Human Brain Project (HBP) and the United States’ $1bn BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) will start to collaborate later this year. Details are yet to be provided, but the effort will start this summer and will include all of the BRAIN Initiative's government partners — the NIH (National Institutes of Health), the NSF (National Science Foundation) and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Henry Markram, who directs the HBP at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), says that Israel's brain...

"Transcendence": 2-minute mini-feature

The director, writer, producer and stars of "Transcendence" talk here about the movie and the ideas behind it.  They all seem to think that uploading a human mind into a supercomputer is a serious possibility.  Paul Bettany reports neuroscientists at CalTech telling him that it may be only 30 years away. Of course this may just be movie hype.

More funding for Obama’s BRAIN

Just under a year ago, President Obama launched the BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research though Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies), a multi-agency project to revolutionize our understanding of the human brain.  The scale of his ambition is enormous: "There is this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked, and the BRAIN Initiative will [do it] by giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action and better understand how we think and how we learn and how we remember. That knowledge could be -- will be -- transformative." The spend in 2014 was $100m, and the 2015 Budget proposes...