Interesting news from around the science press:

A locked-in syndrome patient with an electrode implanted in his brain was able to control a speech synthesizer with his thoughts, according to an item in Nature News. He was able to produce vowel sounds, and people could eventually “speak” whole sentences this way. Talk about speaking your mind.

Marijuana has the potential for warding off the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, according to an item in Scientific American. It looks like pot improves memory by reducing inflammation and stimulating the growth of new brain cells. What was that about short-term memory loss?

Infrared light stimulates the inner ear nerve cells responsible for hearing, according to an item in New Scientist. It’s possible that future laser-based cochlear implants could significantly improve the quality of hearing aids. I guess that’d be called hearing the light.

An item in the current issue of our sister publication ERN spotlights a growing debate in the biofuels community about whether net energy — the amount of energy a fuel produces minus the energy it consumes — is helpful or harmful as a measure of a biofuel’s sustainability. Some researchers say a broader set of metrics is needed.

A pair of items in the current issue of our sister publication ERN point out that the installed base of gasoline and diesel engines are getting some attention from energy researchers.

One item puts a twist on the idea of using electric fields to manipulate fluids. Researchers have experimented with using electric fields to control smart fluids for decades. Researchers at Temple University are sending fuel through an electric field to boost automobile mileage.

The other item is about a method for making everyday gasoline, diesel and jet fuel green, or at least as green as liquid hydrocarbon fuels can be.

The physics of light is at the fore of the current TRN. The lead item, Quantum weirdness promises better imaging, reveals a new application of quantum physics. The item Reversing time promises invisibility could open a practical route to invisibility shields.

Speaking of light, take a look at the current ERN. You’ll find six advances in drawing energy from sunlight. My favorites have to do with bugs and plants.

An item in the current TRN issue about computing via visual perception has me wondering if the method could be adapted to take advantage of one of the great strengths of the human brain: pattern recognition. Is it possible to pose a problem mathematically so that the correct answer has a discernible pattern when all of the possible answers are represented visually?

Imagine scanning through a three-dimensional cloud of random dots, lines or shapes — the solution space in math jargon — until you come to a part of the cloud that has a pattern. The coordinates of the pattern within the cloud would map to the mathematical representation of the solution.

Today researchers struggle with translating complicated pattern recognition problems into the stepwise logic of computers in order to give the machines humanlike vision and language understanding. Perhaps someday researchers will work on translating numbercrunching problems into the perceptual logic of the human brain.

The news item also reminded me of a distopian science fiction story that horrified me as a kid. A captive blind girl was periodically brought to a room where a machine plugged itself into her eye sockets. If I remember right, she was forced to react to or manipulate blurry shapes, and both the interface and the process were painful. The suggestion was that humans, or at least some humans, had literally become cogs in the machine, or what today we might call human coprocessors.

Can anyone tell me the author and title of that story? I haven’t been able to track it down. Let me know at eric [at] trnmag.com.

Lux Research is forecasting that the market for nanotechnology-based products will grow from $147 billion in 2007 to $3.1 trillion by 2015 — ballooning to 21 times its 2007 size over eight years. Nanotech research and development spending was up to $13.5 billion last year, with corporate spending passing government spending for the first time.

As I’ve posted before, this is not necessarily good for your health.

If you’re hoping to have your picture taken at the North Pole, plan carefully. You might need a boat. Scientists are projecting that this summer global warming-induced Arctic melting will leave the North Pole ice-free for the first time in history. Complete summer melting of Arctic ice is still years and possibly decades away, but a watery North Pole is an ominous milestone.

You might have noticed some changes in the last few weeks. We’ve expanded TRN.

We’ve made the news briefs longer, and each brief has links to the researchers’ websites and to related TRN stories and briefs. The changes are designed to make it easier for you to learn more about how these developments relate to the larger context.

The changes are also precursors to the launch of our new publication, Energy Research News.

Stay tuned, and let us know what you think.

Now we have an idea about how much we don’t know about human biology — lots.

In recent years we’ve learned that interactions among proteins are fundamental to how our bodies function. It looks like there are about 650,000 protein interactions. The interactions we’ve identified make up less than 3/10 of a percent. Put another way, we haven’t identified 99.7 percent of the protein interactions that happened in our bodies.

This sure gives me pause. Are your kids studying hard to become biologists?

The idea of planting trees to suck CO₂ of the atmosphere as a way of slowing down global warming has been around for years. We even know that planting trees in the tropics would be more helpful than in higher latitudes. But one problem with trees is that we humans tend to cut them down and burn them, and the ones that escape the chainsaws eventually die and decay. Either way, the CO₂ they’ve absorbed ends up back in the atmosphere.

A couple of German scientists have found a solution: plant lots of trees and after a while cut them down and bury them. By entombing the wood in old mines we can keep the CO₂ out of the atmosphere.

Hmm. Carbon buried in the ground. Sounds uncomfortably like fossil fuels. What’s to keep future generations from digging up the wood and, say, burning it?

Another problem is the number of trees we’d need to plant. The scientists estimate that we’d have to plant about 4 million square miles of forest to take up the CO₂ produced in a year. That’s an area about the size of Europe. The scientists note that it’s also about as much virgin forest as we’ve cut down in the last century.