Science’s most romantically tragic creation ever. If you say ‘I love you’ to the tiny Cheerio-shaped brain in a petri dish, twelve seconds later it won’t remember. PopSci reports:
Read more »The technicolor ring is an artificial microbrain, derived from rat brain cells–just 40 to 60 neurons in total–that is capable of about 12 seconds of short-term memory.
Developed by a team at the University of Pittsburgh, the brain was created in an attempt to artificially nurture a working brain into existence so that researchers could study neural networks and how our brains transmit electrical signals and store data so efficiently. The did so by attaching a layer of proteins to a silicon disk and adding brain cells from embryonic rats that attached themselves to the proteins and grew to connect with one another in the ring.
But as if the growing of a tiny, functioning, donut-shaped brain in a petri dish wasn’t enough, the team…
