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Category: cyborgs

Wow!!! Chewing gum wearable technology, Cyborg Chips, Ingestible sensors to let doctors know if you’re taking your meds, etc. 2016 is going to be interesting

The phrase “Brave New World” has become one of the most often used clichés in medical technology in recent years. Google the title of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian, and anticipatory, novel with the word medicine and 2,940,000 results appear.

But could there be better shorthand to describe some of the recent developments in medical, health and bio-tech? Consider these possibilities coming to fruition, or close to, in 2016:

1. Back from Extinction

Gene-editing startup Editas Medicine of Cambridge, Mass., filed to go public this month. The company’s founder, Harvard professor George Church, hopes to, among other things, revive the extinct woolly mammoth or create a facsimile. Investors include Google and Bill Gates.

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This article does bring one interesting question up for the broader population to really ask themselves and that is at what point does an individual truly become a Cyborg v. not? And, how do we know for sure that some of us are not already there given the bionic implants, our daily interactions and addiction to technology. Definitely, something for each person to think about.

Roy Batty was born—sorry, “incepted”—Friday, Jan. 8, 2016. The Blade Runner replicant, played with aggressive melancholy by Rutger Hauer, went on to see attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion and watch C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate before delivering one of sci-fi’s most moving soliloquies on life, memory, and mortality. And then he was lost, like tears in the rain.

Quibble if you want: Batty was an android, a replicant—not a cyborg. But in Blade Runner he wasn’t one half of the man versus machine binary. He was the complication—the living, breathing proof that a mere assemblage of technology could be, in fact, more human than human. This refusal of a simple division—the belief that sometimes machines could show us humanity, even as humans could become like machines—was a hallmark of Philip K. Dick’s later work, and it’s distilled to its essence in Batty.

So he’s not a cyborg, but he does what the cyborg does: Make us question the boundaries we draw between man and machine. When we think of cyborgs, we often think, well, of Star Trek’s Borg, a pale, fleshy collective bonded to its Giger-esque machinery. Or Darth Vader, clad in black and, again, pale and disfigured. Or, more heroically and telegenically, Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, an armored hero with a machine for a heart.

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Really nice. I may actually see the day that I can climb Everest or K2 at 100 yrs old with my cyborg body.

I like to joke that I’m technically 33 years old, but on the inside I’m 65. I’m less inclined to make that joke after spending 20 minutes or so inside Genworth’s “Aging Experience” exoskeleton. The R70i, which apparently is a barely coded reference to the fact that 70 percent of Americans will need some sort of long term care as they age, is a full body simulator that lets you experience what its like to lose your sight, hearing and even range of motion as the effects of aging creep in.

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An Aging Suit: This Exoskeleton lets you know what it feels like to get older.

Interesting use of the latest tech being shown at the largest consumer electronics show in the world CES 2016.

Iyaz Akhtar donned a 40-pound suit complete with a helmet to find out what it’s like to live with the physical pain that comes with ageing.

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Johnny Matheny is the first person to attach a mind-controlled prosthetic limb directly to his skeleton. After losing his arm to cancer in 2008, Johnny signed up for a number of experimental surgeries to prepare himself to use a DARPA-funded prosthetic prototype. The Modular Prosthetic Limb, developed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, allows Johnny to regain almost complete range of motion through the Bluetooth-controlled arm. (Video by Drew Beebe, Brandon Lisy) (Source: Bloomberg)

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And the Singularity rolls ever on. And on.

“Cytokine converter” AND-gate synthetic-biology prosthesis used to treat psoriasis in mice. Top left: skin before; right: skin after. (credit: Lina Schukur et al./Science Translational Medicine)

An advanced “molecular prosthetic” — a cell with synthetic gene circuits that can be implanted into an organism to take over metabolic functions that the organism cannot perform itself — has been developed by ETH Zurich scientists.

Previous gene circuits typically monitored only whether one disease-causing molecule (called a cytokine) was present in their environment and if so, produced a single therapeutic cytokine as a response. The new “cytokine converter” synthetic circuit functions like an AND gate: It can detect two different cytokines simultaneously, and if (and only if) both are present, produces two different cytokines that can treat a disease.

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Small Form Factor Technology Solves Complexities of Thought-Controlled Leg Prosthetics

Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago has developed the first neural-controlled bionic leg, using no nerve redirection surgery or implanted sensors. It’s a powerful advancement in prosthetics, including motorized knee and ankle, and control enabled by the patient’s own neural signals. Powered by a tiny but powerful Computer-on-Module platform, this thought-controlled prosthetic represents a significant breakthrough in medical embedded design, improving patients’ lives and mobility with a prosthetic that more closely than ever acts like a fully-functioning natural limb.

The technology of prosthetic limbs has come a long way over time, yet options are still limited for leg amputees. While simple peg legs have evolved to more sophisticated and realistic artificial limbs, the patient was forced to undergo nerve surgery or endure invasive implants. And even though the technology to produce through-controlled mechanized arms has existed for some time, the complexities of leg motion have kept it from being successfully applied in leg prosthetics. Without the ability to move and control the knee and ankle, the prosthetic leg remained a passive solution for patients struggling to replicate natural leg motion.

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My new article for Vice Motherboard. It’s about one of the biggest ideas I believe in–the necessity to spend more money directly on science goals instead of bomb making and defense:

It just so happens that there is another way—a method that would satisfy liberals and conservatives alike. Instead of always spending more on our military, we could transition our nation and its economy into a scientific-industrial complex.

There’s compelling reason to do this beyond what meets the eye. Transhumanist technology is starting to radically change human life. Many experts expect to be able to stop aging and conquer death for human beings in the next 25 years. Others, like myself, see humans merging with machines and replacing our every organ with bionic ones.

Such a new transhuman society will require many trillions of dollars to satisfy humans ever-growing desire for physical perfection (machine or biological) in the transhumanist age. We could keep our economy humming along for decades because of it.

Whatever happens, something is going to have to give in the future regarding military profiteering. Part of this is because in the past, the military-industrial complex operated off always keeping a few million US military members ready on a moment’s notice to travel around the world and fight. But there’s almost no scenario where we would need that kind of human-power (and infrastructure to support it) anymore.

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3D printing in the medical industry isn’t new. We’ve seen companies 3D print prosthetics and even bones, but now a company in India has claimed to have developed 3D printable liver tissue, which they are hoping that one day will be usable for full-fledged liver transplants, although we suppose there will be quite a bit of legal and regulatory hurdles to overcome.

According to Pandorum Technologies, the company behind the technology, they claim that these 3D printed liver tissues are made of human cells and will allow for inexpensive medical research. This also means that reachers will need to rely less on human and animal trials. The entire process could also save companies millions of dollars which is usually needed in research and development.

Pandorum Technologies’ co-founder Arun Chandru said, “Our 3D bio-printed mini-livers that mimic the human liver will serve as test platforms for discovery and development of drugs with better efficacy, less side effects and at lower costs.” Apart from being used as test platforms, 3D printable liver tissue could also be used for other purposes.

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