For centuries, humans have been using technology to make up for their shortcomings. People missing limbs got prosthetics. People with weak hearts got pacemakers. But, at a certain point, becoming a cyborg is less like fixing something broken than it is like gaining new powers.
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An enterprising 16-year-old in Kansas recently 3D-printed at prosthetic hand for his 9-year-old family friend, giving the young tyke the use of fingers for the first time in his life. And he did it all at the local county library.
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Do you ever get tired of holding your phone to your face? How about trying to chat in loud, crowded places?
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The dream of the cyborg is coming true at an exhilarating rate. As humans gets better and better at making machines, we keep attaching those machines to our bodies to make ourselves better humans. It seems at times that the only question left is if we can put a human brain in a robotic frame. Actually, it’s not a matter of if. It’s a matter of when.
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If you take a step back and really think about it, we’re living in a pretty futuristic age. People are flying around on jetpacks. Everybody’s carrying around pocket computers. We go to space, like, all the time. We can control prosthetic limbs with our minds
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If you think about how connected we are—smartphones in our pocket, computers on our laps, internet at our fingertips—it might be reasonable to assume that we kind of, sort of already are cyborgs. Can you imagine if someone in the past saw a person wearing Google Glass today? He’d totally believe that person was half-robot.
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Google’s been pushing its Project Glass hard lately, with Sergey Brin wearing a pair everywhere, and going so far as to call smartphones “emasculating.” The space-age specs do seem pretty cool, but everyone’s favorite Canadian cyborg Steve Mann told IEEE Specturm that he’s concerned about its design. And he would know. More »
While it’s a shame that the Fukushima disaster could well have been prevented, you can only dwell on the past for so long. If Japan is to move on from this disaster, the Fukushima facility must come down. But how does one disassemble such a highly radioactive structure? One research team hopes the solution involves this new generation of radiation-shielding, strength-magnifying exo-suits. More »
Growing human tissue is old hat, but being able to measure activity inside flesh is harder — any electrical probing tends to damage the cells. But a new breakthrough from Harvard researchers has produced the first “cyborg” tissue, created by embedding functional, biocompatible nanowires into lab-grown flesh. In a process similar to making microchips, the wires and a surrounding organic mesh are etched onto a substrate, which is then dissolved, leaving a flexible mesh. Groups of those meshes are formed into a 3D shape, then seeded with cell cultures, which grow to fill in the lattice to create the final system. Scientists were able to detect signals from heart and nerve cell electro-flesh made this way, allowing them to measure changes in response to certain drugs. In the near-term, that could allow pharmaceutical researchers to better study drug interaction, and one day such tissue might be implanted in a live person, allowing treatment or diagnosis. So, would that make you a cyborg or just bionic? We’ll let others sort that one out.
Harvard scientists grow human cells onto nanowire scaffold to form ‘cyborg’ skin originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Aug 2012 20:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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