Due to the Chinese New Year festivities in February, I had less time to browse around for science articles so only three of them this month:

• This article in The New York Times covers some very preliminary work on how brain signals can be transferred from one laboratory rat to stimulate another rat to perform an action intended by the original rat. It’s as if the original rat were remote-controlling the other rat, in this case made even more impressive by the fact that the signals were encoded and transmitted over the Internet from one rat to another. As the article goes on to note it is very simplistic and the responses were correct only slightly more often than random chance, but it’s still a step in an intriguing direction.
• The next one is from Wired which discusses how dolphins may have personal names of their own, called signature whistles, and may address each other by these names. This suggests that dolphins are able to learn specific signals, as opposed to intuitive ones, and use them to communicate, all without the intervention or guidance of human handlers.
• Finally this last one from The Atlantic comes with a video must be seen to be believed. It pulls the wraps off DARPA’s 1.8 Gigapixel video camera that can cover pretty much the entire area of a medium-sized city with enough resolution to spot a person waving their arms on the ground. That’s some serious Big Brother surveillance capability there.