Chip of the Old Blockhead
From the Washington Post: "Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Germany have electronically linked multiple snail neurons onto transistor chips and demonstrated that the cells communicate with each other and with the chips. Biophysicist Peter Fromherz says: "It's very primitive, but it's the first time that a neural network was directly interfaced with a silicon chip. It's a proof-of-principle experiment." The combination of biology and technology eventually may lead to such things as artificial retinas or prosthetic limbs that are extensions of the human nervous system, and the development of robots possessing far more intelligence than the current generation of such machines." -- thanks to David Farber