Shit man, I don’t even know where to begin on this one. Except this: FUCKING RAT-BRAIN CONTROLLED ROBOT. The connotations are seemingly so benign, but the future of rat-brain robotics strikes me as no less than totally menacing. I imagine herds of roborats deestroying New York…someone please write that script for me?

So they take a fetus rat brain, break it down to its individual neurons, plop it on a dish inside a robot and BOOM! Rat-brained Robot. And then the learning begins…Fuck yeah!

From BBC:

The blob of nerves forming the brain of the robot was taken from the neural cortex in a rat foetus and then treated to dissolve the connections between individual neurons.

Sensory input from the sonar on the robot is piped to the blob of cells to help them form new connections that will aid the machine as it navigates around its pen.

As the cells are living tissue, they are kept separate from the robot in a temperature-controlled cabinet in a container pitted with electrodes. Signals are passed to and from the robot via Bluetooth short-range radio.

The brain cells have been taught how to control the robot’s movements so it can steer round obstacles and the next step, say its creators, is to get it to recognise its surroundings.

Once the robot can do this the researchers plan to disrupt the memories in a bid to recreate the gradual loss of mental faculties seen in diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

And you call this art? I would have used the skeletons!!11:

Art major Aliza Shvarts ’08 wants to make a statement. Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

“I hope it inspires some sort of discourse,” Shvarts said. “Sure, some people will be upset with the message and will not agree with it, but it’s not the intention of the piece to scandalize anyone.”

I think “sure, some people will be upset” is a lock for Understatement of the Year 2008.

UPDATE:  So the veracity of the original reporting on this story is being called into question:

What was her “process”? How did she create these so-called miscarriages? She asked boys she knew to donate sperm (she claims she also asked them to have tests for sexually transmitted diseases), she supposedly implanted that sperm into herself, and then she took these claimed herbal concoctions misleadingly called “abortifacient drugs” to end the pregnancy with forced miscarriage.

The main question is, was she ever pregnant? I have to say most likely no. The “turkey baster” method of implanting semen for impregnation is very ineffective, though known to be successful. Sperm does not live for too long once it hits the open air, so implantation would had to have occurred quickly after the issuing of the fluids. So, to assume that this girl had actually impregnated herself is not a good bet. There is no indication that there was any sort of “controls” placed on her efforts at implantation and, since there was never once any medical care, there is no proof that she ever was pregnant at all.

Secondly, the so-called “drugs” she used to induce the “miscarriages” are not real drugs. To even call them drugs is misleading. The so-called drugs, the abortifacient drugs, are herbal concoctions that have no medicinal value. The makers of these drugs make unsubstantiated claims that their mixtures cause miscarriage but there are no scientific studies of these claims and the FDA does not regulate these fake drugs under law — meaning the claims are not accepted as scientific fact. So, Shvarts’ claim that she took “drugs” to induce miscarriage is built on the false claims of fake these “drugs.”

Then we have the blood. Nine months gives us at the very least 27 days of menstruation. There is little indication that the blood used in this “art” project is anything other than normal flow.

So, what do we really have here? No proof of any real impregnation, no proof that the “drugs” taken could really induce miscarriage, and no medical tests to buttress any claims. In other words, we have a hoax. If not a hoax, we have a girl who has no idea what she is talking about and too many willing accomplices in the school and the media to just accept her claims as truth without any logic or science to put such claims to the test.