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Scientists at work on rewiring human brains | Marketplace From American Public Media

Scientists at work on rewiring human brains

Brain scans to detect cancer

Scientists in the Midwest are researching ways to rewire the brains of people who’ve suffered traumatic brain injuries. We speak with Pedram Mohseni and Randolph J. Nudo about their work, which has recently been given a $1.44 million grant by the Defense Department.

The Department of Defense has granted $1.44 million to a program run by Pedram Mohseni at Case Western Reserve University and Randolph J. Nudo at Kansas University Medical Center. The two have been working for three years already on a method of essentially rewiring the human brain to bypass the parts that have been damaged.

You’ve got to listen to this. You get the main idea by reading the headline, but the interview and report at a little extra.

Can you imagine this a few years down the road. Aside for tremendous uses for victims of injuries and disease (think Alzheimer’s), this is the next designer surgery in 20 years. Imagine repurposing sections of your brain to carry more load. This is brain optimization down the road.

Yes. I could be reading too much into this, but I think that this assumption isn’t far off. Even beyond storage implants, this is making best use of the matter we already have. Fascinating.

Race maps of America – plus I added some Chicago-specific links in the post

Revealed: The maps that show the racial breakdown of America’s biggest cities

By
David Gardner
Last updated at 5:49 PM on 25th September 2010

These are the maps that show the racial breakdown of America’s biggest  cities.

Using information from the latest U.S. census results, the maps show the extent to which America has blended together the races in the nation’s 40 largest cities.

With one dot equalling 25 people, digital cartographer Eric Fischer then colour-coded them based on race, with whites represented by pink, blacks by blue, Hispanic by orange and Asians by green.

The resulting maps may not represent what many might expect Barack Obama’s integrated rainbow nation to look like, as many cities have clear racial dividing lines.

These are pretty cool. Really, they are just what I would expect to see. No big surprises.

I was more interested in a city that I could identify with, so I found Fischer’s maps for Chicago.

http://chicagoist.com/2010/09/20/mapping_chicagos_racial_and_ethnic.php?galle…

But, I think that these maps are even cooler.

http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?chicagodots

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