Monitoring Brain Activity With Mesh Electronics

An anonymous reader writes: Medical researchers have long known that bioelectronics could substantially improve patient diagnosis and treatment, but the difficulty in putting that circuitry into place kept more traditional options at the forefront. Now, a team of scientists has found a clever way to deliver flexible electronic meshes via syringe, which could make it easier to monitor complex brain activity without dangerous surgery. "The scientists demonstrated they could inject a 2mm wide sample of the mesh through a glass needle with an inner diameter of only 95m. During injection, the mesh structure continuously unfolds as it exits the needle. Injection of the mesh through a needle with a 600m inner diameter produced similar results." The team has already tested the technique on rodents, and found minimal response from astrocytes, cells involved in repairing damaged brain tissue. They were able to record the rodents's brain activity as well.

I have a bad feeling about this

[Anonymous Coward]

95 meters is kinda big for a needle

Re:I have a bad feeling about this

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a Slashdot girlie thing- leaving off the Micro- prefix. Orders of Magnitude are _hard_.
Thus micrometer is reduced to m.
A microprocessor is just a processor.
A microscope is just a scope.
Microcode is just code.
One is supposed to gather context by mind-reading; the classic Slashdot girlie trait.
Expect an upcoming Roblimo video where some neckbeard merely stares into the camera with hypnotoad eyes for 20 minutes. A full transcript will be provided.

Re:

[Ihlosi]

Things get really confusing when you omit the prefix on microphone ... or Microsoft.

Look at the bright side:

[Ihlosi]

No chance of headache. In fact, you won't feel anything at all .. permanently.

In unrelated news: 'm' is not an abbreviation of 'micron'.

Re:

[ray-auch]

More worrying is what the hell kind of rodent they have created where you need a 95m needle to inject into the brain...

Who did this?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

The scientists demonstrated they could inject a 2mm wide sample of the mesh through a glass needle with an inner diameter of only 95m

The system, Tiny, Angstrom-level Regional Dermal Injection System, or TARDIS, benefis both medicine and research.

Re:

[Barny]

Yeah, FTFA 95m is actually the measurement, not meters.

Re:

[Barny]

Dafuq? It seems that slashdot is actually cutting off the Mu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[feathersmg]

In this case, people often use "um". This is far less confusing than "m" which is the official abbreviation for "meter".

Re:

[shaitand]

Less confusing would have been for the standards body to make the abbreviation "um" in the first place and skip non text characters on official units of measure.

Geezzze GET YOUR UNITS RIGHT. m is not mmj

[Anonymous Coward]

95m is right about 300 feet. I don't thing such a "needle" could inject anything. Squash the target maybe, but only if the rim hits it.

Re:

[Ihlosi]

I don't thing such a "needle" could inject anything.

I guess you don't need to inflate small asteroids on a regular basis?

Re:A new low?

[VorpalRodent]

"Yo momma so fat, her insulin come from prototype mesh electronics delivery mechanisms" just doesn't have that same punch.

What a syringe that is!

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

"The scientists demonstrated they could inject a 2mm wide sample of the mesh through a glass needle with an inner diameter of only 95m.

The more significant achievement seems to be, at least to me, creating a syringe with an inner diameter of 95 meters.

Re:

[shaitand]

"The more significant achievement seems to be, at least to me, creating a syringe with an inner diameter of 95 meters."

I'm actually more impressed by the creature of a rat who requires a 95 meter i.d. needle for a brain injection. You be afraid of dinosaurs being brought back. I'll just be back here hoarding cheese to appease our new overlord.

Neat, but...

[Rei]

... ideally what we really need to get to eventually is the point where we can read all neurons at the same time. Injectable meshes aren't going to cut it for that.

The best I can envision is injecting bioluminescent proteins into the brain that flash when different types of activation or chemical concentration are achieved in different neurons. Ideally they'd flash at different frequencies for different cells by having the color adjusted by various local concentrations of chemicals that vary between cells,

Re:

[thedonger]

... ideally what we really need to get to eventually is the point where we can read all neurons at the same time. Injectable meshes aren't going to cut it for that.

Already been done: https://youtu.be/Skxhii6VFdo [youtu.be]

Re:

[shaitand]

But why turn off the source brain or wait for death?

Re:

[Fortran IV]

It's wonderfully ironic that, with your signature, you're the first poster to actually comment on the story instead of the 95-meter needle.

Anyone else immediately think about Scorpius?

[daboochmeister]

Shades of John Crichton's implant ...

unit loss

[epine]

The missing micron is quite a bit funnier if you've just skimmed another recent story submission:

[Philae's] seven months of lost data were completely unnecessary, and resulted solely from the world's nuclear fears.

We don't even need to bring up Tepco, which is just as well since plutonium is a different beast. We are talking plutonium, aren't we?

Mars Climate Orbiter [wikipedia.org]

However, on September 23, 1999, communication with the spacecraft was lost as the spacecraft went into orbital insertion, due to ground-based