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"Anyone who has heard the snap of a rubber band breaking knows it's time to reach for a replacement.
But a group of French scientists have made a self-healing rubber band material that can reclaim its stretchy usefulness by simply pressing the broken edges back together for a few minutes.
The material, described on Wednesday in the journal Nature, can be broken and repaired over and over again."
Full article:
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20080221/tsc-uk-rubber-band-011ccfa_1.html
The Blue Brain project is now at a crucial juncture. The first phase of the project—"the feasibility phase"—is coming to a close. The skeptics, for the most part, have been proven wrong. It took less than two years for the Blue Brain supercomputer to accurately simulate a neocortical column, which is a tiny slice of brain containing approximately 10,000 neurons, with about 30 million synaptic connections between them. "The column has been built and it runs," Markram says. "Now we just have to scale it up." Blue Brain scientists are confident that, at some point in the next few years, they will be able to start simulating an entire brain. "If we build this brain right, it will do everything," Markram says. I ask him if that includes selfconsciousness: Is it really possible to put a ghost into a machine? "When I say everything, I mean everything," he says, and a mischievous smile spreads across his face.