Insect Cyborgs May Be The Spies And First Responders Of The Future
Airborne bugs equipped with sensors, microphones, and cameras will one day go wherever people cannot. Science Daily reports:
Research conducted at the University of Michigan College of Engineering may lead to the use of insects to monitor hazardous situations before sending in humans.
“Through energy scavenging, we could potentially power cameras, microphones and other sensors and communications equipment that an insect could carry aboard a tiny backpack,” Professor Khalil Najafi said. “We could then send these ‘bugged’ bugs into dangerous or enclosed environments where we would not want humans to go.”
The principal idea is to harvest the insect’s biological energy from either its body heat or movements. The device converts the kinetic energy from wing movements of the insect into electricity, thus prolonging the battery life. The battery can be used to power small sensors implanted on the insect (such as a small camera, a microphone or a gas sensor) in order to…
Man Gets Smartphone Built Into His Arm
For this disabled British man, becoming a bit of a transhuman cyborg makes everyday tasks more doable. However, I think the rest of us will eventually get smartphones implanted in our arms simply out of laziness. Via the Telegraph:
Trevor Prideaux, who was born without his left arm, used to have to balance the smartphone on his prosthetic arm or put it on a flat surface to use it. But now Mr. Prideaux, 50, can call and text his loved ones without moving the mobile, which is embedded into his fiberglass and laminate limb.
The catering manager sought help from medical experts and communications chiefs at Nokia to build the special prosthethic. They carefully carved a phone shaped fibrecast cradle into the skin-colored prototype, allowing his Nokia C7 to sit inside it.
Mr Prideaux, of Wedmore, Somerset, said: “I think this is the first time this has ever been done in the world…
Secret of NIMH? Memory Implant Boosts Brain Function in Rats
This article reminds me a bit of The Secret of NIMH. Yes, my first awareness of animal experimentation was likely from a(n) Disney animated movie. Benedict Carey writes in the New York Times:
Though still a long way from being tested in humans, the implant demonstrates for the first time that a cognitive function can be improved with a device that mimics the firing patterns of neurons. In recent years neuroscientists have developed implants that allow paralyzed people to move prosthetic limbs or a computer cursor, using their thoughts to activate the machines.
In the new work, being published Friday, researchers at Wake Forest University and the University of Southern California used some of the same techniques to read neural activity. But they translated those signals internally, to improve brain function rather than to activate outside appendages.
“It’s technically very impressive to pull something like this off, given our current level of technology,” said…
Austrian Man Amputates His Hand To Replace It With Bionic One
Give this guy a hand for his courage. Won’t someone lend him a hand? … and so on. The BBC reports on our entry into the age of cyborgs, with laser-shooting eye transplants surely right around the corner:
An Austrian man has voluntarily had his hand amputated so he can be fitted with a bionic limb. The patient, called “Milo”, aged 26, lost the use of his right hand in a motorcycle accident a decade ago. After his stump heals in several weeks’ time, he will be fitted with a bionic hand which will be controlled by nerve signals in his own arm.
The patient, a Serbian national who has lived in Austria since childhood, suffered injuries to a leg and shoulder when he skidded off his motorcycle and smashed into a lamppost in 2001 while on holiday in Serbia.
A further operation involving the transplantation of muscle and nerve tissue into his forearm…
Augment Your Body With Brainwave-Controlled Cat Ears
Completely real and available for purchase now from Japanese startup outfit Neurowear. Being a bionic cyber-feline has never looked cuter. Via Wired UK:
The ears twitch through a range of different positions, which correspond to different brain activity. So when you concentrate, the ears point upwards and when you relax the ears flop down and forwards. Mind control isn’t new, but lately advances have been made to make mass market control devices at affordable prices.
Make Your Own Remote-Controlled CockroachBorg
Slightly modify the circuitry from a remote-controlled toy, attach to a household cockroach, and, voila! A living RoboRoach, whose movements can be controlled via electrical impulses. After watching the below video, this creature/machine will be scuttling through your nightmares for days.
Professor to Install Camera in the Back of His Head
Tracy Staedter writes at Discovery News:
According to this article from the Wall Street Journal, Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi assistant professor at New York University is having a camera surgically embedded in the back of his head.
The unusual act is part of a museum installation called 3rdI. For a year, the camera will take still pictures in one-minute intervals and send them wirelessly to Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar, which will display them on monitors.
Bilal is known for his provocative art. He has a tattoo on his back that details American and Iraqi casualties, he set up a website where people could shoot him remotely with paint balls and created a suicide-bomber avatar of himself in a video game that hunted down President George W. Bush.
The 3rdI project, which launches December 15, has raised a bunch of privacy concerns that the university is still addressing. The semi-permanently installed…
Camera-Headed Birds Keep Tabs on the Citizens of Dutch City
No worries, it’s just an art project in the Dutch city of Utrecht reported on by Cyriaque Lamar on io9.com:
Has Big Brother begun dabbling in fringe science? No, it’s just a mutant street art project by the artist duo Helden. Here’s how Helden (a.k.a. Thomas voor ‘t Hekke and Bas van Oerle) describe their camerabirds:
‘panoptICONS’ addresses the fact that you are constantly being watched by surveillance cameras in city centres. The surveillance camera seems to have become a real pest that feeds on our privacy. To represent this, camera birds — city birds with cameras instead of heads — were placed throughout the city centre of Utrecht where they feed on our presence. In addition, a camera bird in captivity was displayed to show the feeding process and to make the everyday breach of our privacy more personal and tangible.
Korean Artist Imagines a Tomorrow of Sentient Machines
Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two predicted this was the year when humanity would make contact with an alien intelligence. But if you’ve seen the work of U-Ram Choe, you know the shocking truth: They’re already here.
The brainchild of the South Korean sculptor, “New Urban Species” is an art show disguised as a natural history exhibit from the future, and it’s one of the most engaging displays on tour this year.
U-Ram Choe builds art that comes from a not-to-distant-tomorrow, where organic life and mechanized objects have become one. His kinetic sculptures are not only creepy-fun marvels, they also create a compelling dialog about machine consciousness and the coming Singularity.
In his book Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology, brain researcher Valentino Braitenberg demonstrates how human beings invest the increasingly complex behaviors of mechanical devices with a range of values and abilities including aggression, creative thinking, personality and free will, and how we project…
First Human ‘Infected with Computer Virus’ (Video)
Rory Cellan-Jones reports on BBC News:
A British scientist says he is the first man in the world to become infected with a computer virus. Dr Mark Gasson from the University of Reading contaminated a computer chip which was then inserted into his hand.
The device, which enables him to pass through security doors and activate his mobile phone, is a sophisticated version of ID chips used to tag pets.
In trials, Dr Gasson showed that the chip was able to pass on the computer virus to external control systems. If other implanted chips had then connected to the system they too would have been corrupted, he said.
The Eyeborg Rob Spence Wants Augmented Reality in His Head
What is augmented reality? Check out the Eyeborg’s latest project:
Disinformation: The Podcast interviewed Rob Spence last year, take a listen. Also check out this impromptu CrunchGear interview with the Eyeborg (right in the NYC Disinformation office) that took place around the same time:
The Health Care Industry Apocalypse In ‘Repo Men’
Annalee Newitz reviews Repo Men on io9.com:
With health care a source of fierce debate in America, a movie like Repo Men was bound to be made. A bloody satire of the marriage between medicine and capitalism, it’s about repo men who collect on overdue artificial organs.
A cult musical about this same topic, called Repo! The Genetic Opera, came out last year, though Repo Men itself was based on a novel called The Repossession Mambo. The idea of scary semi-serial killers who kill to repossess mechanical organs seems to be in the air. Indeed, one of the best parts of Repo Men is the way it captures the sentiments of millions of people who feel dicked over by hospitals and medical insurance companies right now. But the movie’s strength is also its problem: Evil medical corporations are a pretty easy target, and Repo Men gives us a black-and-white view of a problem that is in reality all shades of gray.
Hypersigils Reconsidered
Via Technoccult:
I’ve been thinking recently about Grant Morrison’s “hypersigil” concept, but considering as not an occult/magical practice, but as as a cybernetic phenomena. [...]
The way I see it, the online persona, fictional self, or avatar one creates can create feedback loops to reinforce behaviors and perceptions and have a create significant “real world” changes in a person’s life over time.
In the case of Grant Morrison, he was also shaping his persona in the letters column of The Invisibles, in interviews he gave, and his public persona at comic conventions.
Perform Amateur Home Surgery to Implant Tech Into Your Body
Lepht Anonym writes on h+ magazine:
“Biohacker” Lepht Anonym discusses amateur home surgery to implant technology into her body — and challenges the media portrayal of cyborg prosthetics “that only the elite can afford…”
“I’ve made scalpel incisions in my hands, pushed five-millimeter diameter needles through my skin, and once used a vegetable knife to carve a cavity into the tip of my index finger…”
“Anesthetic is illegal for people like me, so we learn to live without it.”
Now RFID readers can recognize her hand-implanted biochip, and she’s added a series of implants that also sense electromagnetic fields. The implants can register power lines, an active hard drive, and even signals sent by a cell phone, while its magnetism can hold screws to the back of her hand.
“I’m an idiot, but I’m an idiot working in the name of progress. You just need curiosity and the willingness to withstand some pain.”
Read More: h+ magazine
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Cyborg Anthropologist Amber Case Interviewed
Klint Finley interviews Amber Case on Technoccult:
What are some of your most interesting recent findings?
Some of my favorite things have been mistakes. For instance, when a middle aged woman thinks that she’s sending a private message to someone she’s been seeing, and in reality she posted on her wall for everyone to see.
Yahoo Answers are amazing. It’s where a lot of very young kids ask each other ridiculous questions — and young kids answer back.
Also, looking at people’s signatures. Not their handwritten ones, but their digital ones. How they compose sentences and where they use capitalization. How they respond to things, etc. It really tells a lot about who they are.
The other thing I like to discover is digital artifacts. There are some digital archeologists and historians who try to keep data alive and in circulation. When one considers it, and Stewart Brand has mentioned this quite a bit ……
A Device That Lets You Type With Your Mind
Tim Barribeau writes on io9.com
By placing electrode grids inside patients’ skulls, researchers at the Mayo Clinic have created a way for people to type words using only their brainwaves. It’s a major breakthrough for brain-computer interface research.
The experiments were undertaken on patients who already had electrodes in their brain to monitor epilepsy. Readings were taken via electrocorticography (ECoG), as the subjects were shown a grid of letters and numbers. As each symbol was illuminated, the patient was told to focus on the letter or number, and data was recorded. Once this calibration data was taken, the patients would think of a letter or number, and their brain waves would be appropriately translated to the screen. The theory is that this technique will allow people to communicate and type far more easily when they suffer from Lou Gehrig’s disease, MS, or paralysis.
Read More: io9.com
Future Shock: Intel Wants Brain Implants in Its Customers’ Heads by 2020
Jeremy Hsu writes on Popular Science:
If the idea of turning consumers into true cyborgs sounds creepy, don’t tell Intel researchers. Intel’s Pittsburgh lab aims to develop brain implants that can control all sorts of gadgets directly via brain waves by 2020.
The scientists anticipate that consumers will adapt quickly to the idea, and indeed crave the freedom of not requiring a keyboard, mouse, or remote control for surfing the Web or changing channels. They also predict that people will tire of multi-touch devices such as our precious iPhones, Android smart phones and even Microsoft’s wacky Surface Table.
Turning brain waves into real-world tech action still requires some heavy decoding of brain activity. The Intel team has already made use of fMRI brain scans to match brain patterns with similar thoughts across many test subjects.
Plenty of other researchers have also tinkered in this area. Toyota recently demoed a wheelchair controlled with brainwaves, and…
British Man Receives ‘Bionic Bottom’
On the Telegraph:
Ged Galvin, 55, now presses a remote control to open his bowels and go to the toilet.
The IT project manager from Barnsley, south Yorkshire, almost died when an off-duty police officer pulled out in front of him in her car. Mr Galvin suffered massive internal injuries and had to be fitted with a colostomy bag until surgeons at the Royal London Hospital could perform the complex operation to rebuild his bottom.
The medical team took a muscle from above his knee, wrapped it around his sphincter, and then attached electrodes to the nerves. These are now operated by a palm-sized remote control that he carries in his pocket. “It’s like a chubby little mobile phone,” he said. “You switch it on and off, just like switching on the TV…
