Brain on a Chip

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22339/page1/

Excerpts from the article:

"An international team of scientists in Europe has created a silicon chip designed to function like a human brain. With 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections, the chip is able to mimic the brain's ability to learn more closely than any other machine."

"...the current prototype can operate about 100,000 times faster than a real human brain...We can simulate a day in a second," says Karlheinz."

"Despite efforts to make the chips as biologically plausible as possible, Markram admits they are still crude compared to what can be achieved in simulation. "It's not a brain. It's a more of a computer processor that has some of the accelerated parallel computing that the brain has," he says."