US Joins Google, Microsoft In "Brain Race" 94
Nerval's Lobster writes "Decades after the space race pitted the United States against Russia, a new race has emerged: the race to map the human brain. The New York Times reported Feb. 18 that the Obama administration is gearing up to announce the Brain Activity Map project, an effort to map an active human brain that could give new insight into how neurons interact with each other, providing new avenues of research for diseases such as Alzheimer's. The U.S. will apparently pit itself against a collection of European research agencies that have announced similar projects. The U.S. effort, however, will apparently involve U.S. businesses, which would naturally benefit from the high-profile nature of the effort; in theory, the latter could also apply the resulting discoveries to their own computing efforts. The Times reported that representatives from Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm met with government representatives at the California Institute of Technology to try and figure out whether or not there are sufficient computing resources to process the vast amounts of data that the experiments are expected to produce, or whether new ones would need to be built."
Ewww! (Score:2, Funny)
Decades after the space race pitted the United States against Russia, a new race has emerged: the race to map the human brain.
Money quote: "One small step for (a) man, one giant leap for ... [squish] oops!"
Brain activity (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Really?? (Score:2, Funny)
The companies will try, contractors will try to try, subcontractors will try to try to try
I would bet on the Europeans coming first. (Score:1, Funny)
Anything involving MS would result in studies of how a virus effects the brain...
The results of which would be bloated beyond the ability to compute.
Re:Religion? (Score:3, Funny)
Amen, Brother!
Re:I bet this race is about patent (Score:2, Funny)
Fortunately you're not exercising that capability now, so you're well prepared to save on that fee
Re:my bet (Score:4, Funny)
Faberge eggs are pretty useless as crash helmets for chickens.
[Citation needed]