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January/February 2018^ DISCOVER^79
CLOCKWISE FROM BOTTOM LEFT: JAY SMITH; JOHN WEINSTEIN/THE FIELD MUSEUM; DAS, AJ ET AL./DOI.ORG/10.1371/JOURNAL.PONE.0179264, JU
LY 5, 2017 CC BY 4.0
80
79
Scan Is Fast and
Budget-Friendly
❯
SOMETIMES, TACKLING a large project on a small
budget leads to a huge innovation.
Forensic dentists wanted close-up scans of the jaw of
Sue, the famed T. rex that resides at Chicago’s Field Museum.
But their equipment wasn’t big enough to scan Sue’s 5-foot-
long skull, so the dino dentists turned to the group Camera
Culture, part of MIT’s Media Lab.
Their fix, announced in July: a video game camera, about
the size of a can of tennis balls, that creates a 3-D map
called a point cloud, plus some free software to analyze it.
The cost: $150.
An image from the new technique, which uses a Microsoft
Kinect/Xbox One camera and MeshLab software, isn’t
the best quality: Its resolution stops at 500 micrometers.
(That’s just a bit bigger than the average grain of table salt.)
High-end scanners, which cost $30,000, can go as low as
50 micrometers. But Camera Culture’s approach is cheap and
fast — scanning Sue’s entire skull took just two minutes.
Museums can now create virtual models for outreach and
education without busting their budget, and possible research
applications abound. — STEVEN POTTER
Going
Deep
❯
DEEP BRAIN STIMULATION is a
valuable therapeutic tool, allowing
experts to target specific brain cells
to help treat disorders like Parkinson’s
disease and obsessive-compulsive
disorder. The catch? Activating specific
buried neurons requires sticking
electrodes directly into the brain — a
technique that involves risky surgery.
In June, an international team of
researchers reported it had developed
a noninvasive way to stimulate neurons
deep in the brain using electrodes placed
on the scalp. Their method relies on
what’s called temporal interference.
Essentially, the electrodes are set at two
different frequencies that are normally
too high to activate neurons. But in the
spots where the currents cross paths, that
interaction generates a lower frequency
to which neurons respond. Since these
slivers of low-frequency currents depend
on the electrodes’ placement, researchers
can easily arrange them on the scalp to
get at those hard-to-reach neurons while
leaving other neurons untouched.
The work, published in Cell, has only
been tested on mice, but if it proves
viable in humans, it could open the door
to therapy for people struggling to cope
with neurological disorders. — LACY SCHLEY
At Chicago’s Field Museum, researchers were able to scan the entire
5-foot-long skull of famous T. rex specimen Sue in just a couple of minutes
using a new and affordable imaging technique (above). The approach
pairs free software with a video game camera.
Electrodes at
frequency #1
Electrodes at
frequency #2
Neurons respond
where frequencies
cross paths