A new way to study the brain's invisible secrets | Ed Boyden
Neuroengineer Ed Boyden wants to know how the tiny biomolecules in our brains generate emotions, thoughts and feelings — and he wants to find the molecular changes that lead to disorders...
==========
Hello, everybody. I brought with me today a baby diaper. You'll see why in a second. Baby diapers have interesting properties. They can swell enormously when you add water to them, an experiment done by millions of kids every day. (Laughter) But the reason why is that they're designed in a very clever way. They're made out of a thing called a swellable material. It's a special kind of material that, when you add water, it will swell up enormously, maybe a thousand times in volume. And this is a very useful, industrial kind of polymer. But what we're trying to do in my group at MIT is to figure out if we can do something similar to the brain. Can we make it bigger, big enough that you can peer inside and see all the tiny building b...
==========
Hello, everybody. I brought with me today a baby diaper. You'll see why in a second. Baby diapers have interesting properties. They can swell enormously when you add water to them, an experiment done by millions of kids every day. (Laughter) But the reason why is that they're designed in a very clever way. They're made out of a thing called a swellable material. It's a special kind of material that, when you add water, it will swell up enormously, maybe a thousand times in volume. And this is a very useful, industrial kind of polymer. But what we're trying to do in my group at MIT is to figure out if we can do something similar to the brain. Can we make it bigger, big enough that you can peer inside and see all the tiny building b...
