Useless fact of the day:

Cleveland spelled backwards is "DNA level C".

Bet most of ya hadn't thought of that. I know I hadn't :)

Ok, what I'm am gonna do to you today is basically to be lazy and go TECH bonkers on ya. I'm simply gonna paste 2 relatively long texts about some techno babble that I found in a Star-Trek news letter that I got recently. Well, hope it interests you, if not, then you're a cultureless boiler without your priorities straight. And quite a wanker too :)

Without further ado, boil on:

TREK TO REALITY: BRAIN IMPLANTS

ATLANTA (AP) -- J.R. was trapped in a silent prison, his body tethered to a ventilator because of a devastating stroke, his limbs paralyzed and his voice silenced.

The 53-year-old man's brain functions normally, but his body doesn't respond to its commands. Alert and intelligent, he could only communicate by blinking.

Until now. Six months after Emory University researchers implanted a tiny, Star Trek-like device into the patient's brain to amplify its signals, J.R. is able to express his thoughts with words.

"See you later," he says, through the computer's voice synthesizer. "Nice talking with you."

Researchers believe the tiny implant - the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen - is the first device that allows direct communication between the brain and a computer. It's been used on a patient once before.

The implant is allowing J.R., a patient at the Atlanta Veterans Affairs Medical Center, to use brainpower to move a cursor across a screen and convey simple messages such as "hello" and "goodbye."

The implanted device amplifies J.R.'s brain signals, which are then transmitted to a laptop computer through an antenna-like coil on his head.

"Of all things people lose, the ability to communicate is the most frightening thing -- to know what you want to say and not to be able to say it," said Dr. Warren Selman, a neurosurgeon at University Hospitals of Cleveland who was not involved in the research.

"This is the first step to unlocking that," he said Monday.

Like a computer mouse, the brain signals can move a cursor across the bomputer screen and point at icons with messages. The man can also use the cursor to tell others that he is hungry or thirsty.

"It's like we're making the mouse the patient's brain," said Dr. Roy Bakay, one of two Emory University doctors who developed the technology.

Eventually, researchers hope to use the technology to teach patients to write letters, send e-mail and turn lights off and on via computer.

It opens up a very exciting new chapter in rehabilitation for such patients," said Dr. William Friedman, program director and associate chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Florida.

Bakay and Dr. Phillip Kennedy implanted the tiny glass cone into the man's brain six months ago. A substance that encourages nerves to grow prompted the brain's nerves to link up to electrodes in the cone, forming what Bakay calls "a little brain" inside the cone.

The electrodes transmit electrical impulses produced by the brain to a computer.

To train J.R.'s brain, researchers told him to think about grabbing a glass.

The cone is implanted in an area of the brain that can produce signals designed to cause movement.

The first human patient, a woman suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease, was able to control computer signals for 76 days before she died. J.R. -- he was not identified further by researchers -- is the second patient. The National Institutes of Health is paying for research on at least one more patient.

Bakay and Kennedy have been testing the technology on animals for 12 years. Kennedy has patented the technology.

For more than a decade, some paralyzed people have communicated with a computer program that translates their coded blinking into letters on a screen. J.R. can blink, but "I think he enjoys doing this," Bakay said.

Selman expressed caution about using the technology on anybody except patients with long-term paralysis. "You'd hate to put something in somebody in an area they're going to recover," he said.

---- o ----

TREK TO REALITY: TRANSPORTING LIGHT

Release at 4 p.m. EDT (2000 GMT)
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON, Oct 22 (Reuters) - They may not be able to ask Scotty to beam them up yet, but California researchers said on Thursday they had completed the first "full" teleportation experiment.

They said they had teleported a beam of light across a laboratory bench. They did not physically transport the beam itself, but transmitted its properties to another beam, creating a replica of the first beam.

"We claim this is the first bona fide teleportation," Jeff Kimble, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology, said in a telephone interview.

Kimble thinks the experiment shows quantum teleportation can eventually transform everyday life.

Scientists hope that quantum computers, which move information about in this way rather than by using wires and silicon chips, will be infinitely faster and more powerful than present-day computers.

"I believe that quantum information is going to be really important for our society, not in five years or 10 years, but if we look into the 100-year time frame it's hard to imagine that advanced societies don't use quantum information," Kimble said.

"The appetite of society is so voracious for the moving and processing of information that it will be driven to exploit even the crazy realm of quantum physics."

Quantum teleportation allows information to be transmitted at the speed of light -- the fastest speed possible -- without being slowed down by wires or cables.

The experiment depends on a property known as entanglement -- what Albert Einstein once described as "spooky action at a distance."

It is a property of atomic particles that mystifies even physicists. Sometimes two particles that are a very long distance apart are nonetheless somehow twinned, with the properties of one affecting the other.

"Entanglement means if you tickle one the other one laughs," Kimble said.

In the weird world of quantum physics, where the normal ideas of what is solid or what is real do not apply, scientists can use these properties to their advantage.

What Kimble's team did was create two entangled light beams -- streams of photons. Photons, the basic unit of light, sometimes act like particles and sometimes like waves.

They used these two entangled beams to carry information about the quantum state of a third beam. The first two beams were destroyed in the process, but the third successfully transmitted its properties over a distance of about a yard (metre), Kimble's team reported in the journal Science.

Last December a team of physicists in Innsbruck, Austria and a month later another team in Rome said they did a similar thing, with single photons. But Kimble said his team was able to verify what they had done, and also used full light beams as opposed to single photons.

"Ours is an important advance beyond that," he said.

Although the Caltech team worked with light, Kimble thinks teleportation could be applied to solid objects. For instance, the quantum state of a photon could be teleported and applied to a particle, even to an atom.

"Way beyond sex change operations and genetic engineering, the quantum state of one entity could be transported to another entity," Kimble said. "We think we know how to do that."

In other words, an object's individual atoms would not be transported, but transmitting its properties could create a perfect replica.

Could this mean the transporters of the television and movie science-fiction series Star Trek, which beam people and objects for huge distances, could one day be a reality?

"I don't think anybody knows the answer," Kimble said.

"Let's don't teleport a person -- let's teleport the smallest bacterium. How much entanglement would we need to teleport such a thing?"

Would such a teleported bacterium actually be the same bacterium, or just a very good copy?

"Again, no one knows for sure," Kimble said. But his team is working on it.

Hope you found this certified Tech-Blab interesting, I know I did. If not, then u suck and cheat and lame and raaaaa !

Kidding ofcourse. All to each their own :)

With liberty and justice for all...

<------ Metallica fan. Gnug out !