Rat-brained robot

Steve Potter, professor of biomedical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is using rat neurons to create a robot's brain. "In his experiment, Potter places a droplet of solution containing thousands of rat neuron cells onto a silicon chip that's embedded with 60 electrodes connected to an amplifier. The electrical signals that the cells fire at one another are picked up by the electrodes which then send the amplified signal into a computer. The computer, in turn, wirelessly relays the data to the robot," says the article. "Basically, we've taken these cells in a dish and given them back a body," says Potter.