DARPA, US Department of Defense research arm, has for quite some time been running a Brain Machine Interface Program. This project first caught my attention when Technology Review wrote about Mind-Machine merger in May (subscription is required to read the full article).

Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI) are among my favorite subjects in the Wetware realm. The potential of BMI is incredible if it is well implemented, but it also opens a Pandora’s box of interesting philosophical and even more so ethical questions.
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A collaboration art project between the Potter Lab at Georgia Tech and SymbioticA Research Group recently grabbed the attention of the likes of Nature and Wired. The project is called MEART (official site). In short it is a robot arm that draws pencil drawings on paper, controlled by real living rat neurons. And what is more, the “brain” is in Atlanta, USA, while the “body” is in Perth, Australia, communicating over the Internet!
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