Ed Boyden, an Assistant Professor, Biological Engineering, and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, will give a presentation on using light to study and treat brain disorders at 3.30pm on Wednesday at EmTech 2010. Watch a live feed of the session here.

The last few decades have seen a surge of invention of technologies that enable the observation or perturbation of information in the brain. Functional MRI, which measures blood flow changes associated with brain activity, is being explored for purposes as diverse as lie detection, prediction of human decision making, and assessment of language recovery after stroke. Implanted electrical stimulators, which enable control of neural circuit activity, are borne by hundreds of thousands of people to treat conditions such as deafness, Parkinson's disease, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. [Read the full article]

A nanowire sensor made by researchers at Tel Aviv University can detect extremely small traces of commonly used explosives in liquid or air in a few seconds. The device is a thousand times more sensitive than the current gold standard in explosives detection: the sniffer dog.The sensor could be cheaply produced and incorporated into a handheld instrument for detecting buried landmines or concealed explosives at security checkpoints, according to Fernando Patolsky, a chemistry professor who led the work, which was published in the journal Angewandte Chemie last week. The researchers are developing a portable instrument based on the technology. Their first prototype is about the size of a brick. "We could put the sensors everywhere in an airport, in every corner of a shopping mall," Patolsky says.Trained dogs have historically been used to sniff out bombs and landmines because they can smell explosives at concentrations of just a few parts per billion. [Read the full article]

The Physics arXiv Blog produces daily coverage of the best new ideas from an online forum called the Physics arXiv on which scientists post early versions of their latest ideas. Contact me atKentuckyFC @ arxivblog.comThe ability to grasp and hold objects is one of those human skills that robots have never quite got the hang of.Most attempts to tackle the problem have centred around giving robots human-like fingers. That seems sensible, given that it's the solution discovered by the multibillion-year optimisation process we call evolution.And yet, we clearly haven't yet uncovered all of nature's tricks. Robotic fingers generally require a centralised control system to handle data streams from touch and visual sensors and which then calculates how to carry out a grasping action.Humans clearly have a way of short-cutting or simplifying this process. [Read the full article]