Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

The first person in the world to become a government-recognized cyborg

Annalee Newitz on io9

Neil Harbisson is the first person on the planet to have a passport photo that shows his cyborg nature — in his UK passport, he’s wearing a head-mounted device called an eyeborg. The color-blind artist says the eyeborg allows him to see color, and he wants to help other cyborgs like himself gain more rights.

Anyone who has ever gotten a passport photo knows Harbisson has accomplished something that once seemed bureaucratically impossible. Other people with cyborg headgear, like Steve Mann, have had their gear forcibly removed and been refused entrance into buildings for wearing devices on their heads. But with a passport photo that shows the eyeborg as part of Harbisson’s face, somebody trying to rip his augmentation off would be committing a violent crime equivalent to injuring his face.

Dezeen has a fascinating interview with Harbisson, where he talks about how his body adapted to the device he now thinks of as an integral part of himself.

Read more

Michael del Castillo
Upstart Business Journal Technology & Innovation Editor

The UpTake: Enon Landenberg is taking augmented reality into uncharted territory by integrating it with artificial intelligence.

Augmented reality took another step towards being something more than just a gimmick with today’s announcement that Infinity AR has partnered with Beyond Verbal, an Israeli startup that decodes and measures human emotions in voice.

“Augmented reality is the front end. It’s just presentation,” said Infinity AR founder Enon Landenberg in an interview with Upstart Business Journal. But this new partnership, according to Landenberg, will enable users to determine if a potential investor is lying during a business meeting, or if a romantic interest means it when she tells you she’ll call later.

“We don’t need to develop tone recognition,” he said. “We take it from Beyond Verbal.”

Read more

By Rich McCormick on

http://cdn1.sbnation.com/entry_photo_images/9508155/bitcoin9_large_verge_medium_landscape.jpg

A single bitcoin is now worth over $1,000, but the process of mining for the digital currency — in which people devote computing power to facilitate global Bitcoin transactions and secure the currency’s network — is growing increasingly expensive. Serious miners have started to build dedicated facilities for the sole purpose of Bitcoin mining. Journalist Xiaogang Cao visited one such center in Hong Kong, the “secret mining facility” of ASICMINER, reportedly located in a Kwai Chung industrial building.

The mine is the size of a shipping container, and filled with 1-meter-high glass tanks in which banks of blades are immersed in roiling liquid. Each tank can hold 92 blades; the blades themselves are kept at a temperature of 37 degrees Celsius or below by “open bath immersion” technology. Open bath immersion cools computer components by submersing them in liquid with a particularly low boiling point. The heat the components generate mining for coins boils the liquid, causing it to turn gaseous, rise up to a condenser at the top of the tank, and fall once again, removing heat from the components in the process. The ASICMINER open bath immersion system was reportedly built by Hong Kong-based company Allied Control, and operates at a Power Usage Effectiveness of 1.02, which “would make it one of the most efficient designs in the world.”

Read more

3d-printed-gun

By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was speaking at a government function in July when a man sitting a few rows behind him pulled a Liberator, the infamous 3D-printed gun that the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) recently defined as a “lethal weapon.”

The gun posed no real danger. The man bearing it was just a TV reporter trying to prove how easy it is to sneak a 3D-printed plastic gun past security checks that include metal detectors.

See also: First 3D-Printed Metal Gun Fires 50 Rounds and Counting

In the United States, a law prohibits amateur gunsmiths from manufacturing undetectable plastic guns to prevent such a scenario. However, the law is set to expire in just a week, on Dec. 9.

Read more

By James Gallagher

Health and science reporter, BBC News

Tongue piercing

Body piercings have been used to control wheelchairs and computers in a move scientists believe could transform the way people interact with the world after paralysis.

The movement of a tiny magnet in a tongue piercing is detected by sensors and converted into commands, which can control a range of devices.

The US team said it was harnessing the tongue’s “amazing” deftness.

The development is reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

The team at the Georgia Institute of Technology made the unlikely leap from body art to wheelchairs because the tongue is so spectacularly supple.

A large section of the brain is dedicated to controlling the tongue because of its role in speech. It is also unaffected by spinal cord injuries that can render the rest of the body paralysed, tetraplegic, as it has its own hotline to the brain.

“We are tapping in to the inherent capabilities of the tongue, it is such an amazing part of the body,” Dr Maysam Ghovanloo told the BBC.

Read more

By MICHAEL VIRTANEN
Associated Press

QUEENSBURY, N.Y. (AP) — Coming soon to your local sheriff: 18-ton, armor-protected military fighting vehicles with gun turrets and bulletproof glass that were once the U.S. answer to roadside bombs during the Iraq war.

The hulking vehicles, built for about $500,000 each at the height of the war, are among the biggest pieces of equipment that the Defense Department is giving to law enforcement agencies under a national military surplus program.

For police and sheriff’s departments, which have scooped up 165 of the mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, or MRAPS, since they became available this summer, the price and the ability to deliver shock and awe while serving warrants or dealing with hostage standoffs was just too good to pass up.

“It’s armored. It’s heavy. It’s intimidating. And it’s free,” said Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple, among five county sheriff’s departments and three other police agencies in New York that have taken delivery of an MRAP.

Read More

A researcher envisions the ultimate cure for “range anxiety”: roadway-powered vehicles with modified on-board power receivers.

One way to extend the range of electric vehicles may be to provide power wirelessly through coils placed under the surface of a road. But charging moving vehicles with high-power wireless chargers below them is complex.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a way to deliver power to moving vehicles using simple electronic components, rather than the expensive power electronics or complex sensors previously employed. The system uses a specialized receiver that induces a burst of power only when a vehicle passes over a wireless transmitter. Initial models indicate that placing charging coils in 10 percent of a roadway would extend the driving range of an EV from about 60 miles to 300 miles, says Srdjan Lukic, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at NCSU.

Wireless charging through magnetic induction—the same type typically used for electric toothbrushes—is being pursued by a number of companies for consumer electronics and electric vehicles (see “Wireless Charging—Has the Time Finally Arrived?”). Such chargers work by sending current through a coil, which produces a magnetic field. When a car with its own coil is placed above the transmitter, the magnetic field induces a flow of power that charges the batteries.

Read more

By

November 11, 2013

Anyone who has left youth behind them knows that bumps and scrapes don’t heal as fast as they used to. But that could change with researchers at the Stem Cell Program at Boston Children’s Hospital finding a way to regrow hair, cartilage, bone, skin and other soft tissues in a mouse by reactivating a dormant gene called Lin28a. The discovery could lead to new treatments that provide adults with the regenerative powers they possessed when very young.

Lin28 is a gene that is abundant in embryonic stem cells and which functions in all organisms. It is thought to regulate the self-renewal of stem cells with the researchers finding that by promoting the production of certain enzymes in mitochondria, it enhances the metabolism of these cellular power plants that found in most of the cells of living organisms. In this way, Lin28 helps generate the energy needed to stimulate the growth of new tissues.

“We already know that accumulated defects in mitochondrial metabolism can lead to aging in many cells and tissues,” says Shyh-Chang Ng. “We are showing the converse – that enhancement of mitochondrial metabolism can boost tissue repair and regeneration, recapturing the remarkable repair capacity of juvenile animals.”

Read More

A University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) surgical team has performed one of the first surgeries using a telepresence augmented reality technology from VIPAAR in conjunction with Google Glass.

The combination of the two technologies could be an important step toward the development of useful, practical telemedicine.

VIPAAR (Virtual Interactive Presence in Augmented Reality) is commercializing a UAB-developed technology that provides real-time, two-way, interactive video conferencing.

Read more

Bart Jansen, USA TODAY 6:18 p.m. EST December 2, 2013

Congress gave the FAA a September 2015 deadline for drones to fly safely with commercial airlines.

The Federal Aviation Administration has a plan for allowing drones to fly everywhere in the country. But research and regulations are months behind the schedule Congress set to have the unmanned devices fly safely with commercial airliners by September 2015.

FAA Administrator Michael Huerta released the five-year road map a month ago. It projected 7,500 unmanned aircraft would be in the skies within that period if regulations are in place.

But the FAA faces technical challenges, among them how much training to require of ground-based pilots, how to ensure that drones fly safely if they lose contact with their pilots and how drones and commercial aircraft should warn each other when they’re in the same area.

“The FAA is committed to safe, efficient and timely integration of unmanned aircraft systems into our airspace,” the agency said in a statement Monday. “Over the next several years the FAA will establish regulations and standards for the safe integration of remote piloted (unmanned aircraft) to meet increased demand.”

Read more