Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: cyborgs

(Hoboken, N.J. — Nov. 7, 2018) — In their latest feat of engineering, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have taken an ordinary white button mushroom from a grocery store and made it bionic, supercharging it with 3D-printed clusters of cyanobacteria that generate electricity and swirls of graphene nanoribbons that can collect the current.

The work, reported in the Nov. 7 issue of Nano Letters, may sound like something straight out of Alice in Wonderland, but the hybrids are part of a broader effort to better improve our understanding of cells biological machinery and how to use those intricate molecular gears and levers to fabricate new technologies and useful systems for defense, healthcare and the environment.

“In this case, our system – this bionic mushroom — produces electricity,” said Manu Mannoor, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stevens. “By integrating cyanobacteria that can produce electricity, with nanoscale materials capable of collecting the current, we were able to better access the unique properties of both, augment them, and create an entirely new functional bionic system.”

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Many scientists research the practical and immediate applications of bio molecular technology but it seems most fail to study our most important, and largest organ, our skin.

Who will officially be the first transhuman? Will it be you? Why wait decades? This article explains one approach to speeding up the process and also the challenge involved.

Defining the Object of the Goal:

Although the words ‘cyborg’ and ‘transhuman’ are often used interchangeably, and someone can aspire to be a combination of both, there are fundamental differences between the two — as has been articulated by Dr. Natasha Vita-More: The transhuman will be genetically programmed and otherwise equipped towards indefinite life extension and to attain a great many other physical and mental capabilities and other benefits. The transhuman also maintains specific transhumanist values and may actively foster the far-reaching humane goals of the transhumanist movement, including guaranteed social justice for all and highly-advanced space colonization to foster indefinite life, peace, etc. Whereas, a cyborg may not uphold transhuman values or goals, and may or may not seek to live longer or indefinitely, but will be fitted with a device or devices to acquire one or more enhanced capabilities (such as better vision and/or hearing, faster running ability, etc.).

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https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/

On the second balmy day of the year in New York, Neil Harbisson, a Catalan artist, musician, and self-professed “cyborg,” walked into a café in the Nolita district of Manhattan. The actor Gabriel Byrne was sitting at a table in the corner. Harbisson approached. “May I do a sound portrait of you? It will just take one minute. For nine years, I’ve been listening to colors,” he explained.

Byrne eyed his questioner from under raised eyebrows. On a slight frame, the 30-year-old Harbisson wore a white T-shirt, deep-pink jeans and black-and-white showman’s brogues. His face was angular, with an aquiline nose and a chin smudged with grown-out stubble. A small plastic oval floated in front of his forehead, attached to the end of a flexible stem that reached around from the back of his head and over a sandy pageboy mop, like the light on the head of an angler fish. This “eyeborg,” as Harbisson calls it, converts light into audible sound, with a pitch that varies according to the color of the light.

With a good-natured shrug, Byrne relented. Harbisson darted down next to his quarry, intent, but with a boyish smile that betrayed his excitement. He pointed the eyeborg first at Byrne’s ear, then his lips, then his left eye, then the bridge of his nose, and finally his salt-and-pepper hair, scribbling down musical notes on the back of a cardboard coffee-holder. Byrne gave him his agent’s email. When Harbisson got back to a computer, he would make a sound file that combined the notes from each bit of Byrne’s anatomy, and send it back to the actor. Harbisson’s collection already included Prince Charles, Nicole Kidman, and Al Gore.

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Though it resembles a coral, root system, or some other kind of growth, the above photo actually depicts a six-inch-wide blood clot in the near-perfect form of the right bronchial tree of a human lung, the Atlantic reported on Thursday. Even more uncomfortable is the revelation that it was not removed by medical staff, but in fact coughed up by a patient who was suffering from heart failure.

The photo was released in late November as part of the New England Journal of Medicine’s Images in Clinical Medicine series. University of California at San Francisco doctors Gavitt A. Woodard and Georg M. Wieselthaler wrote that it came from their patient, a 36-year-old man who had long struggled with chronic heart failure. The patient reportedly had a medical history including “heart failure with an ejection fraction of 20%, bioprosthetic aortic-valve replacement for bicuspid aortic stenosis, endovascular stenting of an aortic aneurysm, and placement of a permanent pacemaker for complete heart block.” When the patient was admitted to the hospital’s intensive care unit, they hooked him up to a pump designed to help circulate blood throughout the body:

An Impella ventricular assist device was placed for management of acute heart failure, and a continuous heparin infusion was initiated for systemic anticoagulation. During the next week, the patient had episodes of small-volume hemoptysis, increasing respiratory distress, and increasing use of supplemental oxygen (up to 20 liters delivered through a high-flow nasal cannula). During an extreme bout of coughing, the patient spontaneously expectorated an intact cast of the right bronchial tree.

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Plastic is a resilient and versatile material, but it’s not that great for the environment — not plastic that’s made from petroleum, anyway. But scientists are cooking up a better alternative.

Chitin, like plastic, is resilient and versatile. Chitin is found in everything from lobster and shrimp shells, insect exoskeletons, and squid beaks. Thanks to a team of Canadian researchers it may soon be found in plastic, too.

Scientists at McGill University in Montreal have developed a process that allows them to process chitinous things into eco-friendly plastic. Associate Professor of Applied Chemistry Audrey Moores told the CBC “it remains biodegradeable, so if it goes in the environment it’s not going to pollute.”

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Ever since 2014, Italy-based Youbionic, which was founded by Federico Ciccarese and specializes in robotics and bionics, has been working on its 3D printed, robot-controlled, bionic prosthetic hand. The company started taking pre-orders for the bionic prosthetic two years ago, and has since been making improvements and updates to the original model, even coming out with a 3D printed double hand device for the augmented human. Now, Youbionic has released its latest bionic product – the Youbionic One.

“We believe that technology at our disposal today can be used for the increase in human capabilities and intervention in the replacement of parts of our body which are not working properly,” Ciccarese wrote in an email.

“Youbionic is committed every day to create technologies that can elevate mankind to a higher level.”

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Not sure if this is real or still vaporware yet. But it IS inevitable. It’s not a matter of “if”, but “when”. And we’re most likely not going to be able to regulate it much, either. If an embryo or fetus is not a human, then parents have the right to do anything they want to it. You might think that this is going to result in eugenics, like erasing melanin genes and starting a race against the fictitious “white genocide”. You’re right. But if you think that’s as bad as it’ll get, think more creatively. What happens when poor parents get paid to implant “willing servility” genes into their unborn children, in order to pay bills. The future is now. Cyborgs will not destroy humanity, but humanity itself might. What kinds of rights can be written into law to prevent this kind of extortion, that won’t also grant fetal personhood and end up derailing abortion rights? It’s going to be a bumpy ride, folks, buckle up!

A Chinese researcher claims he helped make the world’s first genetically edited babies — twin girls born this month, and with DNA he says he altered with a powerful new tool capable of rewriting the very blueprint of life.

If true, it would be a profound leap of science and ethics.

A U.S. scientist said he took part in the work in China, but this kind of gene editing is banned in the United States because the DNA changes can pass to future generations and risks harming other genes.

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Bionic Vision Technologies, a firm based in Australia, has announced that its bionic eye system has been used to restore a “sense of sight” to four completely blind people suffering from retinitis pigmentosa. The findings from the study, which was performed at Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital in Melbourne, were presented at the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Ophthalmologists Scientific meeting.

Unlike previous studies of the technology that were limited to in-lab use, the four patients were able to use the system in their everyday environments.

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