Brain Cells Will Control The Power Plants Of The Future
Neuron Controlled Clemson University engineer Kumar Venayagamoorthy with his neuron-controlled power plant simulation. Clemson UniversityLiving neurons are coming up with better solutions for electricity distribution than people can. Talk about a mind meld. Researchers have hooked up living brain cells, grown in a petri dish, to a computer. The computer runs a simulation of a power plant and sends the neurons problems about electricity distribution. Scientists then take the solutions the brain cells come up with as possible equations for controlling the U.S. electrical grid in the future. (Actual solutions for controlling electricity around the U.S. wouldn't use living neurons; they would just use computer code written after scientists studied what the neurons came up with.) "In a lab, in simulation studies, we have shown that we can intelligently control a power plant with such biologically inspired neural networks," Kumar Venayagamoorthy, one of the project scientists, tells Popular Science. Venayagamoorthy is an...