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(Medical Xpress) -- The idea of a simple, cheap and widely available device that could boost brain function sounds too good to be true.

Yet promising results in the lab with emerging ‘brain stimulation’ techniques, though still very preliminary, have prompted Oxford neuroscientists to team up with leading ethicists at the University to consider the issues the new technology could raise. They spoke to Radio 4's Today program this morning.

Recent research in Oxford and elsewhere has shown that one type of brain stimulation in particular, called transcranial direct current stimulation or TDCS, can be used to improve language and maths abilities, memory, problem solving, attention, even movement.

Critically, this is not just helping to restore function in those with impaired abilities. TDCS can be used to enhance healthy people’s mental capacities. Indeed, most of the research so far has been carried out in healthy adults.

The problem of sending messages securely has troubled humankind since the dawn of civilisation and probably before. 

In recent years, however, physicists have raised expectations that this problem has been solved by the invention of quantum key distribution. This exploits the strange quantum property of entanglement to guarantee the secrecy of a message.

Entanglement is so fragile that any eavesdropper cannot help but break it, revealing the ruse. So cryptographers can use it to send a secure key called a one time pad that can then be used to encrypt a message. If the key is intercepted, the sender simply sends another and repeats this until one gets through.

So-called quantum key distribution is unconditionally secure--it offers perfect secrecy guaranteed by the laws of physics.

Or at least that's what everyone thought. More recently, various groups have begun to focus on a fly in the ointment: the practical implementation of this process. While quantum key distribution offers perfect security in practice, the devices used to send quantum messages are inevitably imperfect.

In the 1932 essay called "Fifty Years Hence", in which he offered his notions of how the world might look in 1982, Winston Churchill wrote: "We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.''

It might have taken longer than 50 years, but Churchill was certainly on to something. Today, scientists are slowly converting his ideas to reality by producing small quantities of "cultured meat" in research laboratories. Indeed, Mark Post of Maastricht University, one of the pioneers in the field, claims he will be able to produce a cultured burger by the end of the year.

Cultured meat – also known as in vitro meat or lab-grown meat – draws on the science of stem cell technology used in medicine. Stem cells are extracted from a pig, say, and converted to pig muscle cells. These muscle cells are then cultured on a scaffold with nutrients and essential vitamins and grown to desired quantities.

AN ARTIFICIAL brain has taught itself to estimate the number of objects in an image without actually counting them, emulating abilities displayed by some animals including lions and fish, as well as humans.

Because the model was not preprogrammed with numerical capabilities, the feat suggests that this skill emerges due to general learning processes rather than number-specific mechanisms. "It answers the question of how numerosity emerges without teaching anything about numbers in the first place," says Marco Zorzi at the University of Padua in Italy, who led the work.

The finding may also help us to understand dyscalculia - where people find it nearly impossible to acquire basic number and arithmetic skills - and enhance robotics and computer vision.