Journal 13, April 12

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29972476/

How cool would it be to walk out to your car, get in and just tell it where you want to go and it would automatically drive you there. Kind of like an autopilot. There is no technology in the near future that will be able to do this but Honda Motor Co. has developed a way to read patterns of electric currents on a person's scalp as well as changes in cerebral blood flow when a person thinks about four simple movements, moving the right hand, moving the left hand, running and eating. This is a small but necessary step in working towards a car that can drive without the help of a human. Honda showed a video of an employee wearing the helmet thought about raising his right hand and in a few seconds the programmed robot raised his right arm. Honda did not do a live performance because they thought that an audience would cause a distraction and the experiment would not work. Another key problem they are facing is brain patterns differ greatly among individuals, and so about two to three hours of studying them in advance are needed for the technology to work. Yasuhisa Arai, executive at Honda Research Institute Japan Co., stated “I’m talking about dreams today, practical are still way in the future.” Honda has made robotics a centerpiece of its image. “Our products are for people to use. It is important for us to understand human behavior," he said. "We think this is the ultimate in making machines move”, Arai told reporters. This is astonishing to me to think that we are able to just think about moving our hand or running and our brain signals can be transmitted to a robot that will do what we are thinking. I can think of this being a series advantage in some aspects of our lives but also making us, humans, even more lazy and reliant on technology.

https://unccmail.uncc.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29900077/
This article is talking about scientists using brain signals and the flow of blood to power electrical devices such as cell phone batteries, iPods and other small devices. It seems that more and more people are trying to figure out how to get away from using batteries and other pollutant items and replace them with things that are produced through our bodies or even using our bodies to run devices.