A team from China has developed a special chip inspired by how they study objects far, far away in space. This chip is designed to help them unlock the secrets of the brain in real time.
The new chip can analyze a large amount of brain data very quickly and work with it immediately
Here’s the problem: scientists can now photograph the entire zebra brain at once, but figuring out what all this information means takes too much time. It’s like having a giant jigsaw puzzle without a picture on the box.
Chinese researchers have noticed something interesting. When astronomers study rapid bursts of radio waves from space, they also need to analyze large amounts of data quickly. So, the scientists took a page from the astronomers’ book and developed a chip with special computing power. This chip can process a huge amount of brain data (like hundreds of movies playing simultaneously) and immediately begins to make sense of it.
Their study, published in a scientific journal, shows that the chip really works. It can track the activity of up to 100,000 brain cells in a tiny zebrafish. Scientists have even used the chip to control the swimming of a paralyzed zebrafish, which is reminiscent of the Neuralink chip – but it’s not a mistake to compare the two.
We hope that this tiny chip will be a big leap forward in brain research. It can help scientists understand how our brains work in real time, leading to new data and, even better, new treatments.
