Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and the University of Southern California (USC) have demonstrated the successful implementation of a prosthetic system that uses a person’s own memory patterns to facilitate the brain’s ability to encode and recall memory.
In the pilot study, published in today’s Journal of Neural Engineering, participants’ short-term memory performance showed a 35 to 37 percent improvement over baseline measurements. The research was funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Jeffrey Tibbetts prepped for implantation and scrubbed in, methodically sudsing up to his elbows, scraping the dirt from under his fingernails and scouring his hands with a rough brush to render his body sterile before donning a pair of beige latex surgical gloves.
Behind him, a twentysomething tea barista in ablack baseball cap waited pensively, his left ring finger exposed from under a surgical drape, a tourniquet wrapped tightly around it. For months, an implanted magnet had been uncomfortably bulging out of the side of Zac Shannon’s finger. Tibbetts picked up a scalpel and began cutting, gently scraping away at theflesh until the incision was deep enough to expose the magnet. With the very steady hands of a practiced surgeon, he pulled out the tiny hunk of metal.
Tibbetts plopped another magnet into the finger, sutured it shut, and removed the tourniquet. The small wound began to gush blood.
Apparently needs a lot of work before it can actually operate like a eel/snake. But, i’d wrap this up in skin so it could look like a snake/eel. Give it solar power skin so it could recharge its own batteries; maybe try to use that system that was supposed to be able to eat organic matter to convert into power. Then, put a bunch of sensors on it, and HD cameras for eyes, and rig it so it could transmit to satellites. And you have a pretty impressive drone that can operate in any body of water and on land close to water.
An innovative, eel-like robot developed by engineers and marine biologists at the University of California can swim silently in salt water without an electric motor. Instead, the robot uses artificial muscles filled with water to propel itself. The foot-long robot, which is connected to an electronics board that remains on the surface, is also virtually transparent.
The team, which includes researchers from UC San Diego and UC Berkeley, details their work in the April 25 issue of Science Robotics. Researchers say the bot is an important step toward a future when soft robots can swim in the ocean alongside fish and invertebrates without disturbing or harming them. Today, most underwater vehicles designed to observe marine life are rigid and submarine-like and powered by electric motors with noisy propellers.
“Instead of propellers, our robot uses soft artificial muscles to move like an eel underwater without making any sound,” said Caleb Christianson, a Ph.D. student at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego.
Are we witnessing, as Truthstream Media calls it, “A Zombie Apocalypse” Where reality is becoming a little less real by the day or is this trend something else?
Are people merging with their Smart Phones and becoming programmed by them using Cyborgification or is this something different? Find out…
Could Transhumanism help us overcome the Malthusian nightmare of supposed declining resources in the face of an increasing population?
As the world continues to increase, could our exponentially-growing technologies help us ensure that everyone living on this planet is accommodated for?
When we speak of posthumanism we refer to the expansion of the “natural” faculties of the human being, and more concretely to the fusion between meat and digital technology …
According to Wikipedia a cyborg is an “organism that has restored function or enhanced abilities due to the integration of some artificial component or technology that relies on some sort of feedback”. For the essential author Donna Haraway“the cyborg is a figure born from the interface between the automaton and autonomy”. As blogger and author Plácida Ye-Yé explains for Haraway“the cyborg is at the same time what we are –carnality- and what we can be –future cyborg, emancipatory possibilities-” therefore “if our future depends on thinking differently, the cyborg offers us a transitory ontology for the present, an imagery that recognizes the process of constant redefinition that is going to suppose take on the new era”. Evidently this theories affect a large number of topics: technology, epistemology, politics, science, art, or feminism.
In reference to this hybridation between humans and communication machiens catalonian philosopher and UOC teacher Pau Alsina explains in his text “Humanism 2.0: Art, science, technology and society” that “the image of the body and the body itself are found in the impacts caused by the information and communication technologies, seeing themselves in this way propelled to the understanding of the new experiences that come to us”. This point of view includes –from the perspective of Derrick de Kerckhove – the creation of new types of human typologies identities, and sensorial experiences like: teleception, expansion, multiple personality or proprioception.
My article for the Cato Institute via Cato Unbound is out. Cato is one of the leading think tanks in the world, so I’m excited they are covering transhumanism:
Zoltan Istvan describes a complicated future when humans aren’t the only sapients around anymore. Citizenship for “Sophia” was a publicity stunt, but it won’t always be so. Istvan insists that if technology continues on the path it has traveled, then there is only one viable option ahead for humanity: We must merge with our creations and “go full cyborg.” If we do not, then machines may easily replace us.
Scientists from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center partnered with researchers from the University of Southern California to develop an innovative procedure to give hope to people struggling with remembering important information. A new implant uses a person’s own memory patterns in order to boost the brain’s natural ability to encode those memories and recall them quickly. There has been a reported 35 to 37 % increase in short-term memory performance.
“This is the first time scientists have been able to identify a patient’s own brain cell code or pattern for memory and, in essence, ‘write in’ that code to make existing memory work better, an important first step in potentially restoring memory loss,” said the study’s lead author Robert Hampson, Ph.D., professor of physiology/pharmacology and neurology at Wake Forest Baptist.
Epilepsy patients from Wake Forest Baptist were surgically implanted with electrodes in the various parts of their brains. The electronic prosthetic system is based on a multi-input-multi-output (or MIMO) mathematical model to influence the patterns of neurons firing within the hippocampus.
Researchers at Caltech have induced a range of sensations in the arm of a paralyzed man. The breakthrough comes courtesy of electrodes implanted in the brain, which stimulated the neurons to produce different feelings depending on the type of electrical signals. The team says the research could eventually lead to advanced prosthetic limbs that allow users to feel realistic sensations through them.
Plenty of exciting research is being conducted to help paralyzed people regain control of and feeling in their limbs. The NeuroLife system has helped a quadriplegic man move his arms again using just his thoughts, allowing him to perform a number of actions. Electrical nerve stimulation, both with and without electrode implants, has helped several people voluntarily move their legs again, often for the first time in years.
In this new study, Caltech researchers implanted two tiny arrays of electrodes into the somatosensory cortex, the small region of the brain responsible for the body’s sensations of movement or position, as well as cutaneous sensations such as touch, pressure and vibration.
