Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

This is pretty incredible. Brain' in a dish flies flight simulator. The headline sounds like its a flash ploy and the details might reveal something not quite a "brain in a dish", but check it out, thats pretty much exactly what it is.

"It's essentially a dish with 60 electrodes arranged in a dish at the bottom," explained DeMarse, who designed the study.

"Over that we put the living cortical neurons from rats, which rapidly begin to reconnect themselves, forming a living neural network -- a brain."

Aside from the science fiction awe of the entire thing the "brain" is actually a great project/expiriment for learning how brains in general work and learn.

(Maybe that game the other day . . . "give Bush a Brain" is not outside the realm of possibility, but hey as with other nonsensical so called "science" like stem cells, global warming and evolution maybe we should pretend the jury is out on this too and then "ban" it.)