'Blade Runner' Charged With Murder of Girlfriend

Oscar Pistorius, the Olympic and Paralympic athlete known as the "blade runner," was taken into custody in South Africa today and charged with the murder of his girlfriend, who was fatally shot at his home.

Police in the South African capital of Pretoria received a call around 3 a.m. Thursday that there had been a shooting at the home of 26-year-old Pistorius, Lt. Col. Katlego Mogale told the Associated Press. When police arrived at the scene they found paramedics trying to revive 29-year-old Reeva Steenkamp, the AP reported.

At a press conference early Thursday police said that a 26-year-old man, whom they have not named, was arrested and has requested to be taken to court immediately. Police in South Africa do not name suspects in crimes until they have appeared in court.

RELATED: 'Blade Runner' Oscar Pistorius Faster Than a Horse

AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File

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Mogale said that the woman died at the house, and a 9 mm pistol was recovered at the scene and a murder case opened against Pistorius, the AP reported.

Police said this morning that there are no other suspects in the shooting, and that Pistorius is currently at the police station.

The precise circumstances surrounding the incident are unclear. Local reports say he may have mistaken her for a burglar, according to the AP.

Police said that they have heard reports of an argument or shouting at the apartment complex, and that the only two people on the premises were Steenkamp and Pistorius.

Police confirmed there have previously been incidents of a domestic nature at the home of Pistorius.

Pistorius, a sprint runner, had double below the knee amputations, and part of his legs have been replaced with carbon fiber blades. In 2012 he became the first double leg amputee to participate in the Olympics, competing in the men's 400 meter race. He also competed in the Paralympics, where he won gold medals in the men's 400 meter race, in what became a Paralympics record. He also took the silver in the 200 meter race.

Steenkamp, according to her Twitter bio, is a law graduate and model. On Wednesday she tweeted, "What do you have up your sleeve for your love tomorrow??? #getexcited #ValentinesDay."

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Night-vision rat becomes first animal with sixth sense

Douglas Heaven, reporter

The latest bionic superhero is a rat: its brain hooked up to an infrared detector, it's become the first animal to be given a sixth sense.

Developed by Miguel Nicolelis and colleagues at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, the system connects a head-mounted sensor to a brain region that normally processes touch sensations from whiskers. As shown in this video, the rat's brain is tricked when infrared light is detected, giving it a new sense organ. "Instead of seeing, the rats learned how to touch the light," says Nicolelis.

Even though the touch-processing brain area acquires a new role, the team found that it continues to process touch sensations from whiskers, somehow dividing its time between both types of signal. "The adult brain is a lot more plastic than we thought," says Nicolelis.

The finding could lead to new brain prostheses that restore sight in humans with a damaged visual cortex. By bypassing the damaged part of the brain altogether, it might be possible to wire up a video camera to a part of the brain that processes touch, letting people "touch" what the camera sees.

According to Nicolelis, it could also lead to superhero powers for humans. "It could be X-rays, radio waves, anything," he says. "Superman probably had a prosthetic device that nobody knew of."

If you enjoyed this post,watch a robot and human swap brains to learn teamwork or see a body-sharing robot that lets you experience another place.

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EU ministers to meet on horsemeat crisis

BRUSSELS: European Union farm ministers hold crisis talks in Brussels on Wednesday to agree a response to a scandal over mislabelled frozen meat products which is spreading across Europe.

The snap talks come a day after British police searching for the source of horsemeat found in kebabs and burgers raided two meat plants, the first such operation in the row, and France became the second EU nation after Britain to find horsemeat posing as beef in frozen food.

"If there is horsemeat in hamburgers or lasagne there should've been a label indicating this," EU commissioner for health Tonio Borg said ahead of the talks.

"Consumers are entitled to know what they are eating," he said at a news conference, "If anyone distributes and circulates meat products as beef, when it is not beef, that is in violation" of EU legislation.

It was up to member states to enforce current labelling legislation, he said, reiterating also that the European Commission believed that the scandal "up until now is a labelling issues" and "not a health issue".

"It is evident," he added, "that someone down the line has fraudulently or negligently -- probably fraudulently -- labelled a product in a deceptive way."

Wednesday's talks between EU agriculture ministers opening at 1630 GMT aim to have "an exchange of views and allow for sharing of information between the most affected member states" -- Britain, France, Luxembourg, Poland, Romania and Sweden.

The ministers will also look at "whatever steps may be necessary at EU level to comprehensively address this matter", said Ireland, which currently holds the rotating EU presidency.

On Tuesday, supermarkets in Switzerland and the Netherlands became the latest to pull ready-made meals as anger grows across Europe.

France has called for precise labelling on the origin of meat in ready-made dishes.

And President Francois Hollande warned on Wednesday that the scandal could seriously damage the country's frozen food sector.

"The president underlines that it is a serious affair in relation to consumer confidence and potentially serious for the consequences for the French sector," government spokeswoman Najat Vallaud-Belkacem said.

Interbev, an association representing the French cattle and meat industry, has denounced the EU's failure to act, saying bth consumers and professionals wanted swift action on better labelling.

In Britain, police and officials from the Food Standards Agency on Tuesday raided a slaughterhouse in northern England and a meat-producing factory in Wales. They shut both sites and seized all meat there.

"The agency and the police are looking into the circumstances through which meat products, purporting to be beef for kebabs and burgers, were sold when they were in fact horse," the agency said.

Andrew Rhodes, operations director of the FSA, said he had ordered an audit of abattoirs that produce horsemeat in Britain when the scandal arose last month "and I was shocked to uncover what appears to be a blatant misleading of consumers."

The raids on the British meat premises opened a new front in the pan-European search for the source of the horsemeat: the allegations had so far focused on Romania.

In France, retailer Picard said tests had confirmed that horsemeat was present in two lots of frozen "beef" lasagne meals made by French firm Comigel.

Retailers in Britain, Sweden, France, Switzerland and the Netherlands have been removing Comigel products after the firm alerted Swedish frozen food giant Findus to the presence of horsemeat in its meals last week.

Swiss supermarket giant Coop said it had now withdrawn all frozen lasagnes produced by Comigel as a precaution.

Comigel denies any wrongdoing. It said it obtained its meat from another French firm, Spanghero, which said it was supplied from two abattoirs in Romania who allegedly passed off horsemeat as beef.

But Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta this week angrily denied his country was to blame and called on European Union officials to find out from where the fraud originated and identify the guilty parties.

Dutch supermarkets PLUS and Boni said Tuesday they had withdrawn Primafrost brand frozen lasagne as a precaution because it may contain horsemeat without being marked on the packaging.

-AFP/fl

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Opera embraces WebKit in browser brain transplant

Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Opera Software, an independent voice in the browser market since the 1990s, will dramatically change its strategy by instead adopting the WebKit browser engine used by Safari and Chrome.

The Norwegian company announced the move today and said it will show off the first fruits of the work with a WebKit-based version of its
Android browser at the Mobile World Congress show in less than two weeks. But the company will move to WebKit for its desktop browser, too.

A browser engine processes the Web page instructions written in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS then renders the results on screens. The engine also interactions that are increasingly important as the developer world expands from static Web pages to dynamic Web apps.

Opera Chief Technology Officer Håkon Wium Lie described the company's motives in a statement:

The WebKit engine is already very good, and we aim to take part in making it even better. It supports the standards we care about, and it has the performance we need. It makes more sense to have our experts working with the open source communities to further improve WebKit and Chromium, rather than developing our own rendering engine further. Opera will contribute to the WebKit and Chromium projects, and we have already submitted our first set of patches: to improve multi-column layout.

Hints of Opera's WebKit work emerged with a mobile-browser project called ICE in January, but today's news is a much more sweeping change than just a single product. Opera said it will move gradually to the WebKit for "most of its upcoming versions of browsers for smartphones and computers." It's not immediately clear which products will continue to use Opera's in-house technology, and Opera declined to say which.

Opera has struggled to keep its fifth-place ranking in the browser usage, but it's certainly not irrelevant. The company also announced today that 300 million people use its browsers each month.

But there are difficult trends the company must face. On mobile devices, Opera Mini is a strong contender, but its popularity is chiefly on lower-end phones; iOS and Android devices come with their own WebKit-based browsers. On personal computers, Google's Chrome rose from nowhere in a few years, quickly surpassing Opera and
Safari, while Microsoft by some measures has reversed declines in its share of browser usage.

Although ditching its in-house Presto browser engine raises the possibility of engineering layoffs, Opera spokeswoman Zara Lauder took an optimistic tone when asked about it.

"We have never had more people at Opera working on our products than right now, and we look forward to contributing to WebKit," Lauder said. "This change has been some time in the making, and all hands are now hard at work on making the best possible browser for our users."

Although Opera's profile is lower than that of many rivals, it's still functioning financially. During the company's third quarter of 2012, the most recent for which financial results are available, Opera reported revenue grew 40 percent to $56 million, and its profit was $6.5 million. Its revenue sources include payments from search traffic it drives to partners including Google and Yandex, its own advertising technology, and partnerships with mobile network operators.

The WebKit project began as the KHTML engine used in the KDE project to supply Linux with a polished user interface and a host of software utilities, but Apple became its chief sponsor when it based OS X's WebKit on the project. WebKit got another major boost with Google's embrace.

Adobe Systems now is also contributing as it moves to recreate many of Flash Player's abilities without requiring the browser plug-in, and WebKit also is used in the browsers of BlackBerry OS and Samsung's Bada.

One notable consequence of moving to WebKit is that Opera will be able to more easily support the large and growing number of iOS devices. Apple rules prohibit browser engines besides a version of WebKit that Apple itself supplies (and incidentally, that runs slower than the version Safari on iOS itself uses). Google's Chrome for iOS uses this Apple-supplied version of WebKit, and Opera would be able to make such a move more easily if its own browser used WebKit, too.

WebKit is not a single, unified project, though. For example, Chrome and Safari differ dramatically under the covers in how they execute the JavaScript programs on Web pages. Chrome uses Google's V8 JavaScript engine, whereas Safari uses a different one called Nitro. Opera said it will use V8.

Another consequence of Opera's change is that developers could have an easier time supporting browsers. Although independent testing will still be required, Web pages likely will be easier to write and test -- especially advanced ones using newer features such as animations and "responsive" design that can handle a wide variety of screen types.

With Opera throwing in the towel on its own Presto engine technology, the bulk of the browser market will be reduced to using three primary engines: WebKit, Microsoft's Trident, and Mozilla's Gecko.

Lie also announced Opera's move on the WebKit mailing list.

"Switching from Presto to WebKit frees up resources and allows us to contribute to the WebKit platform," Lie said.

Being part of WebKit potentially gives Opera more clout in the standards world, because it can build experiments that are more easily tested and adopted by fellow WebKit members. That, in turn, makes it easier to formalize new ideas into actual standards.

Opera has begun work on first such standard through WebKit, an approach at Web page layouts that handle multiple columns of text and graphics more easily. Opera has begun submitting patches for the multicolumn layout idea.

"We have experimented with combining multicol layout with page floats and column spans; in 10 lines of CSS code one can create amazingly beautiful, scalable, and responsive paged
presentations," Lie said.

Opera's move from Presto to WebKit arguably give the company a lot more engineering breathing room, since it can share labor with other browser makers instead of pulling all its own weight. But not everybody was happy to hear the news.

"Sad day for my former team at Opera and for the Web to lose a rendering engine," tweeted Anne van Kesteren, who for years worked on standards issues at Opera.

Updated at 12:53 a.m. PT and 1:37 a.m. PT
with further details and comment from Opera.

Opera's revenue continues to steadily grow even as it faces the challenges of being the fifth-ranked browser.

(Credit:
Opera Software)

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Obama Pledges U.S. Action on Climate, With or Without Congress

If there were anything in President Barack Obama's State of the Union to give hope to wistful environmentalists, it was the unprecedented promise to confront climate change with or without Congress, and to pursue new energy technology in the process.

Following his strong statements in his inaugural address about the ripeness of the moment to address a changing climate, Obama outlined a series of proposals to do it. Recognizing that the 12 hottest years on record all occurred in the last decade and a half, Obama said his most ambitious goal would be a "bipartisan, market-based solution," similar to the cap-and-trade system that died in Congress during his first term.(See related story: "California Tackles Climate Change, But Will Others Follow?")

But without legislative action, Obama threatened to act himself using executive authority. "I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy," he said. That will translate, White House officials said earlier in the week, to new regulations for existing coal-burning power plants and directives to promote energy efficiency and new technology research. (See related story: "How Bold a Path on Climate Change in Obama's State of the Union?")

The effort isn't one that can be stalled, he noted. Not just because of a warming planet, but also because of international competition from countries like China and parts of Western Europe that have gone "all in" on clean energy.

Energy experts signaled support of Obama's comments on energy security, including a plan for an Energy Security Trust to use revenue from oil and gas production on public lands to fund new energy research. "Clean energy businesses commend the president for reaffirming his commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to address the damaging and costly impacts of climate change," Lisa Jacobson, president of Business Council for Sustainable Energy, said in a statement. The influential League of Conservation Voters perked up to Obama's vow to act on climate change, even if alone.

Noticeably unmentioned in the speech was the Keystone XL pipeline that would carry oil from Canadian tar sands to the refining centers of Texas. Environmentalists have urged Obama to reject the project's application for federal approval in order to hold the line against carbon-intensive production from the oil sands. (See related blog post: "Obama and Keystone XL: The Moment of Truth?") Energy analysts believe Obama is likely to approve the project in the coming weeks, yet at the same time offer new regulations on domestic oil and natural gas development.

Other environmental analysts took Obama's remarks as simple talk, so far not backed by action. “How many times do we have to have the problem described?” David Yarnold, president of the Audubon Society said after the speech. “Smarter standards for coal-fired power plants are the quickest path to a cleaner future, and the president can make that happen right now.”

Obama's path toward accomplishing those goals will likely be lonely. In the Republican rebuttal to Obama's speech, Florida Senator Marco Rubio sidelined climate change as an issue of concern and highlighted the deep partisan distrust. "When we point out that no matter how many job-killing laws we pass, our government can’t control the weather, he accuses us of wanting dirty water and dirty air," Rubio said. He echoed the long-held Republican concern that remaking an economy may not be the wisest way to confront the problem of extreme weather.

Central to Obama's efforts will be his nominees to lead the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy in his second term. Both roles were at times attacked over his first term, notably when EPA instituted new air and water regulations and DOE was caught making a bad investment in the now-defunct solar manufacturer Solyndra. If the tone of his State of the Union offers a blueprint, he'll choose people unafraid to act.

This story is part of a special series that explores energy issues. For more, visit The Great Energy Challenge.

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Charred Human Remains Found in Burned Cabin

Investigators have located charred human remains in the burned out cabin where they believe suspected cop killer and ex-LAPD officer Christopher Dorner was holed up as the structure burned to the ground, police said.

The human remains were found within the debris of the burned cabin and identification will be attempted through forensic means, the San Bernardino County Sheriff-Coroner Department said in a press release early this morning.

Dorner barricaded himself in the cabin in the San Bernardino Mountains near Big Bear Tuesday afternoon after engaging in a gunfight with police, killing one officer and injuring another, the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department said.

Cindy Bachman, spokeswoman for the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, which is the lead agency in the action, said Tuesday night investigators would remain at the site all night.

FULL COVERAGE: Christopher Dorner Manhunt

When Bachman was asked if police thought Dorner was in the burning cabin, she said, "Right… We believe that the person that barricaded himself inside the cabin engaged in gunfire with our deputies and other law enforcement officers is still inside there, even though the building burned."

Bachman spoke shortly after the Los Angeles Police Department denied earlier reports that a body was found in the cabin, contradicting what law enforcement sources told ABC News and other news organizations.

Police around the cabin told ABC News they saw Dorner enter but never leave the building as it was consumed by flames, creating a billowing column of black smoke seen for miles.

A press conference is scheduled for later today in San Bernardino.

Christopher Dorner Manhunt: Police Exchange Fire With Possible Suspect Watch Video

Fugitive Ex-Cop Believed Barricaded in Cabin, California Cops Say Watch Video

One sheriff's deputy was killed in a shootout with Dorner earlier Tuesday afternoon, believed to be his fourth victim after killing a Riverside police officer and two other people this month, including the daughter of a former police captain, and promising to kill many more in an online manifesto.

PHOTOS: Former LAPD Officer Suspected in Shootings

Cops said they heard a single gunshot go off from inside the cabin just as they began to see smoke and fire. Later they heard the sound of more gunshots, the sound of ammunition being ignited by the heat of the blaze, law enforcement officials said.

Police did not enter the building, but exchanged fire with Dorner and shot tear gas into the building.

One of the largest dragnets in recent history, which led police to follow clues across the West and into Mexico, apparently ended just miles from where Dorner's trail went cold last week.

Sources tell ABC News it all began at 12:20 p.m. PT Tuesday, when a maid working at a local resort called 911, saying she and another worker had been tied up and held hostage by Dorner in a cabin.

The maid told police she was able to escape, but Dorner had stolen one of their cars, which was identified as a purple Nissan.

San Bernardino Sheriff's Office and state Fish and Game officers spotted the stolen vehicle and engaged in a shootout with Dorner.

Officials say Dorner crashed the stolen vehicle and fled on foot only to commandeer Rick Heltebrake's white pick-up truck on a nearby road a short time later.

"[Dorner] said, 'I don't want to hurt you, just get out and start walking up the road and take your dog with you.' He was calm. I was calm. I would say I was in fear for my life, there was no panic, he told me what to do and I did it," Heltebrake said.

"He was dressed in all camouflage, had a big assault sniper-type rifle. He had a vest on like a ballistic vest," Heltebrake added.

Ten seconds later, Heltebrake said, a "volume of gunfire" could be heard.

Sources tell ABC News the gunfire was from Dorner who exchanged fire with two deputies.

The two deputies were wounded in the firefight and airlifted to a nearby hospital, where one died, police said. The second deputy was in surgery and was expected to survive, police said.

Police sealed all the roads into the area, preventing cars from entering the area and searching all of those on the way out. All schools were briefly placed on lockdown.

Believing that Dorner might have been watching reports of the standoff, authorities asked media not to broadcast images of police surrounding the cabin, but sent him a message.

"If he's watching this, the message ... is: Enough is enough. It's time to turn yourself in. It's time to stop the bloodshed. It's time to let this event and let this incident be over," said Los Angeles Police Department spokesman Andy Smith, told reporters at a press conference Tuesday.

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Algorithm learns how to revive lost languages

Like living things, languages evolve. Words mutate, sounds shift, and new tongues arise from old.

Charting this landscape is usually done through manual research. But now a computer has been taught to reconstruct lost languages using the sounds uttered by those who speak their modern successors.

Alexandre Bouchard-Côté at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and colleagues have developed a machine-learning algorithm that uses rules about how the sounds of words can vary to infer the most likely phonetic changes behind a language's divergence.

For example, in a recent change known as the Canadian Shift, many Canadians now say "aboot" instead of "about". "It happens in all words with a similar sound," says Bouchard-Côté.

The team applied the technique to thousands of word pairings used across 637 Austronesian languages – the family that includes Fijian, Hawaiian and Tongan.

Tracking human history

The system was able to suggest how ancestor languages might have sounded and also identify which sounds were most likely to change. When the team compared the results with work done by human specialists, they found that over 85 per cent of suggestions were within a single character of the actual words.

For example, the modern word for "wind" in Fijiian is cagi . Using this and the same word in other modern Austronesian languages, the automatic system reconstructed the ancestor word beliu and the human experts reconstructed bali.

Reconstructing ancient languages can reveal details of our ancient history. Looking at when the word for "wheel" diverges in the family tree of European languages helps us date the human settlement of different parts of the continent, for instance.

The technique could improve machine translation of phonetically similar languages, such as Portuguese and French.

Endangered languages could also be preserved if they are phonetically related to more widely spoken tongues, says Bouchard-Côté. He is now working on an online version of the tool for linguists to use.

Journal: PNAS, 10.1073/pnas.1204678110

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North Korea threatens "stronger" action after nuke test

SEOUL: North Korea said its nuclear test on Tuesday was only a "first" step and warned of stronger action if it was faced with tougher sanctions as a result.

"The latest nuclear test was only the first action, with which we exercised as much self-restraint as possible," the foreign ministry said in a statement carried by the country's official news agency.

"If the US further complicates the situation with continued hostility, we will be left with no choice but to take even stronger second or third rounds of action," it said without elaborating.

The statement came just hours after South Korea's spy agency chief warned Pyongyang might carry out another nuclear test or ballistic missile launch in the coming days or weeks.

North Korea said Tuesday's test was directly targeted at the United States. It accuses Washington of inciting global condemnation of its nuclear programme and of leading the sanctions charge in the UN Security Council.

The ministry statement said any measure like forced ship inspections or a sea blockade would be considered an "act or war" and trigger "merciless retaliations".

The UN Security Council was scheduled to meet in emergency session later Tuesday to discuss the international response to the latest test.

"The US should make a choice between taking the path of easing tension... or continuing on its current, wrong path of pursuing anti-DPRK (North Korea) policies and further escalating tensions," the ministry said.

- AFP/al

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Kumbh Mela: Pictures From the Hindu Holy Festival

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  Holy Bath

  Photograph by Roberto Schmidt, AFP/Getty Images

  The Hindu festival known as Kumbh Mela, often referred to as the world’s largest gathering of humanity, peaked on Sunday at the meeting of the Yamuna, Ganges, and mythical Saraswati rivers. The festival in the northern Indian city of Allahabad sees tens of millions of pilgrims bathe in the Ganges to wash away sins. Pilgrims and saints pray as they soak.

  Published February 11, 2013

  
  











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  New Initiates

  Photograph by Sheeraz Rizvi, Hindustan Times/Getty Images

  Newly initiated Hindu ascetics perform rituals during the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad. The festival happens every three years in one of four Indian cities, with the event in Allahabad considered the holiest. It’s also the biggest.

  Published February 11, 2013

  
  











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  Sacred Fire

  Photograph by Daniel Berehulak, Getty Images

  Hindu priests perform a ceremony beside the Ganges River during the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad. The festival lasts 55 days.

  Published February 11, 2013

  
  











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  River Sitting

  Photograph by Baciu Cristian, Demotix/Corbis

  A Hindu ascetic performs a ritual last month during the 2013 Kumbh Mela.

  Published February 11, 2013

  
  











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  Bridge Crossings

  Photograph by Manish Swarup, AP

  Believers walk on pontoon bridges to take a dip at the confluence of the Ganges, Yamuna, and mythical Saraswati Rivers, a site known as Sangam. The processions are led by heads of monasteries and by naked ascetics smeared with ash.

  Published February 11, 2013

  
  











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  Stampede Victim

  Photograph by Manan Vatsyayana, AFP/Getty Images

  A woman injured in a Sunday stampede that left 36 dead in Allahabad lies in a hospital bed in the city. There are conflicting accounts of what provoked the stampede.

  Published February 11, 2013

  
  











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  Train Rush

  Photograph by Daniel Berehulak, Getty Images

  Hindu devotees at the Allahabad train station press toward an arriving train.

  Published February 11, 2013

  
  











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  Train Station Prayer

  Photograph by Daniel Berehulak, Getty Images

  A Hindu believer waits for a train at the Allahabad train station, the site of Sunday’s stampede.

  Published February 11, 2013

  
  

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Great Energy Challenge Blog

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Why we're building a €1 billion model of a human brain

The Human Brain Project has just won a €1 billion research prize. Its director Henry Markram says the initiative will unify our understanding of the brain

Your project aims to recreate the human brain in a supercomputer. Why?
We want to reach a unified understanding of the brain and the simulation on a supercomputer is the tool. Today you have neuroscientists working on a genetic, behavioural or cognitive level, and then you have informaticians, chemists and mathematicians. They all have their own understanding of how the brain functions and is structured. How do you get them all around the same table? We think of the project as like a CERN for the brain. The model is our way of bringing everyone, and our understanding, together.

What do you hope will come of the project?
There are three goals. As the model becomes more accurate and behaves more like a brain, we could couple it to a robot and see the robot learning. Then we'll be able to trace the chain of events from molecules to cognition.

Second, we plan to collect data from hospitals around the world to search for biological signatures of disease. We believe this will give us a new classification of brain disease, which can be used to diagnose people objectively - not solely based on their symptoms.

And finally, we want to build neuromorphic computers, which would have processors that can learn, mimicking the way the brain does.

How close are you to recreating a brain?
We've developed an algorithm to work out some of the rules for how to reconstruct the brain. We can now make thousands of predictions that when tested are accurate, and we can reconstruct small brain circuits of up to about 1 million rat neurons. Now we've got to connect those groups of neurons to make brain regions, then connect the regions to make a computer model of a whole brain. Once we've modelled a rat brain, then we update the rules and gradually move towards a human model.

Could the model be too detailed?
People are afraid of detail and complexity. But a drug is a molecule. It doesn't hit a cell, or the brain, it hits other molecules. There's no reason why we shouldn't try to explain how all the molecules are interacting with one another. Sheer numbers do not equal complexity. One hundred billion neurons is numbers, not complexity.

What about criticisms that it drains funds from more readily achievable neuroscience?
That is an incredibly short-sighted view of how a big science project impacts the rest of the field. Take the Human Genome Project - you can criticise them for all the promises they made at the time, but we would be in the dark ages now if we hadn't done that project. It has benefitted every biologist and geneticist on the planet today.

Once completed, could the simulated brain ever become conscious?
When we couple the model to a robot, the robot will behave, and we'll see this in the way its neurons are firing. Does that mean it's conscious? That's a philosophical question - and an unresolved one.

This article appeared in print under the headline "One minute with... Henry Markram"

Profile

Henry Markram is the director of the Human Brain Project at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). The project just won a €1 billion European research prize

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