Cientificos ingleses hallan la forma de realizar ropa de camuflaje gracias a la energía electromagnética.

Scientists may be able to make magic like Harry Potter

Thursday, May 25, 2006; Posted: 4:59 p.m. EDT (20:59 GMT)

Scientists theorize they could make a real life invisibility cloak like Harry Potter's.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Imagine an invisibility cloak that works just like the one Harry Potter inherited from his father.

Researchers in England and the United States think they know how to do that. They are laying out the blueprint and calling for help in developing the exotic materials needed to build a cloak.

The keys are special manmade materials, unlike any in nature or the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. These materials are intended to steer light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation around an object, rendering it as invisible as something tucked into a hole in space.

"Is it science fiction? Well, it's theory and that already is not science fiction. It's theoretically possible to do all these Harry Potter things, but what's standing in the way is our engineering capabilities," said John Pendry, a physicist at the Imperial College London.

Details of the study, which Pendry co-wrote, appear in Thursday's online edition of the journal Science.

Scientists not involved in the work said it presents a solid case for making invisibility an attainable goal.

"This is very interesting science and a very interesting idea and it is supported on a great mathematical and physical basis," said Nader Engheta, a professor of electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Engheta has done his own work on invisibility using novel materials called metamaterials.

Pendry and his co-authors also propose using metamaterials because they can be tuned to bend electromagnetic radiation -- radio waves and visible light, for example -- in any direction.

A cloak made of those materials, with a structure designed down to the submicroscopic scale, would neither reflect light nor cast a shadow.

Instead, like a river streaming around a smooth boulder, light and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation would strike the cloak and simply flow around it, continuing on as if it never bumped up against an obstacle. That would give an onlooker the apparent ability to peer right through the cloak, with everything tucked inside concealed from view.

"Yes, you could actually make someone invisible as long as someone wears a cloak made of this material," said Patanjali Parimi, a Northeastern University physicist and design engineer at Chelton Microwave Corp. in Bolton, Massachusetts, Parimi was not involved in the research.

Such a cloak does not exist, but early versions that could mask microwaves and other forms of electromagnetic radiation could be as close as 18 months away, Pendry said. He said the study was "an invitation to come and play with these new ideas."

"We will have a cloak after not too long," he said.

The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency supported the research, given the obvious military applications of such stealthy technology.

While Harry Potter could wear his cloak to skulk around Hogwarts, a real-world version probably would not be something just to be thrown on, Pendry said.

"To be realistic, it's going to be fairly thick. Cloak is a misnomer. 'Shield' might be more appropriate," he said.

Honda desarrolla tecnología capaz de controlar robots con la actividad del cerebro humano

ATR and Honda Successfully Develop New Brain-Machine Interface Creating Technology for Manipulating Robots Using Human Brain Activity

TOKYO, Japan, May 24, 2006– Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (“ATR”) and Honda Research Institute Japan Co., Ltd. (“HRI”) have collaboratively developed a new “Brain Machine Interface” (“BMI”) for manipulating robots using brain activity signals. This new BMI technology has enabled the decoding of natural brain activity and the use of the extracted data for the near real-time operation of a robot without an invasive incision of the head and brain. This breakthrough facilitates greater possibilities for new types of interface between machines and the human brain.

The idea of this BMI technology is based on a highly acclaimed article titled “Decoding the perceptual and subjective contents of the human brain” by Dr. Yukiyasu Kamitani, a researcher at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, which recently appeared in a leading science journal, Nature Neuroscience. For this study, Dr. Kamitani was named by Scientific American magazine as Research Leader, with his collaborator Dr. Frank Tong at Vanderbilt University, within the 2005 Scientific American 50 – the magazine’s prestigious annual list that recognizes outstanding acts of leadership in science and technology. HRI and ATR have developed the article’s theory into a system for real-time brain activity decoding and robotic control.

This research reveals that MRI-based neural decoding can allow a robot hand to mimic the subject’s finger movements (“paper-rock-scissors”) by tracking the hemodynamic responses in the brain. Although there is an approximate 7-second time lag between the subject’s movement and the robot’s mimicking movement, the researchers succeeded in gaining a decoding accuracy of 85%.

This technology is potentially applicable to other types of non-invasive brain measurements such as the brain’s electric and magnetic fields and brain waves. By utilizing such methods, it is expected that the same result could be achieved with less time lag and more compact BMI system devices.




Scanning Brain Activity Using MRI
(showing "scissors")

Analysis of a brain image by a computer program
(Left) Active brain areas
(Upper right) Extracted brain activity patterns
(Lower right) Pattern classification processing


Simulation of the subject's
hand movement by a hand
shaped robot



Experimental Procedures of the Newly Developed BMI


Outline of Experimentation:
The subject in an MRI scanner makes a finger gesture, “paper,” “rock” or “scissors,” while the changes in his/her hemodynamic responses associated with brain activity are monitored every second. Specific signals generating paper-rock-scissors movements are extracted and decoded by a computer program, and the decoded information is transferred to a hand-shaped robot to simulate the original movement performed by the subject.


BMI
While conventional machine-interfaces are operated using button switches controlled by human hands or feet, BMI uses brain activity measured by various devices and allows non-contact control of the terminal machines. Implanted electrode arrays, and brain waves have been commonly used.

Features of the new BMI Technology Developed by ATR and HONDA
The system is aimed for applications of BMI to everyday life, without need for surgery or intensive user training.

1) No Surgery Required
In conventional BMI research efforts led by U.S. neuroscientists, invasive technologies, including electrode array implants, have been used. If advanced non-invasive BMI becomes available, users will be free from the physical burden of a surgical procedure. This research accomplishment demonstrates the possibility of such a useful application.

2) No Specific Training Required
Conventional non-invasive BMI required the user to undergo intensive training in order to generate detectable brain activities. For example, as the brain activity associated with an intention, say “Yes”, is very hard to track, the user is instructed to perform a mental task that is irrelevant to the mental state but associated with easily detectable brain activity such as mental calculation. The user must learn to control such brain activity to express an intention. The new BMI technology is different in that natural brain activity associated with specific movements can be decoded without using alternative brain activity. The experiment revealed that paper-rock-scissors movements were decoded directly from an untrained subject’s real-time brain activity. This is an outstanding breakthrough in brain decoding technologies .