Next week at the World Cup, a
paralyzed volunteer from the Association for Assistance to Disabled
Children will walk onto the field and open the tournament with a
ceremonial kick. This modern miracle is made possible by a robotic
exoskeleton that will move the user's limbs, taking commands directly
from his or her thoughts.
This demonstration is the debut of the Walk Again Project,
a consortium of more than 150 scientists and engineers from around the
globe who have come together to show off recent advances in the field of
brain machine interfaces, or BMI. The paralyzed person inside will be
wearing an electroencephalographic (EEG) headset that records brainwave
activity. A backpack computer will translate those electrical signals
into commands the exoskeleton can understand. As the robotic frame
moves, it also sends its own signals back to the body, restoring not
just the ability to walk, but the sensation as well.
Just how well the wearer will walk and kick are uncertain. The project has been criticized by other neuroscientists as an exploitative spectacle that uses the disabled to promote research which may not be the best path
for restoring health to paralyzed patients. And just weeks before the
project is set to debut on television to hundreds of millions of fans,
it still hasn’t been tested outdoors and awaits some final pieces and
construction. It's not even clear which of the eight people from the
study will be the one inside the suit.
The point of the project is not
to show finished research, however, or sell a particular technology.
The Walk Again Project is meant primarily to inspire. It's a
demonstration that we’re on the threshold of achieving science fiction:
technologies that will allow humans to truly step into the cyborg era.
It’s only taken a little over two centuries to get there.
The past
Scientists have been studying
the way electricity interacts with our biology since 1780, when Luigi
Galvani made the legs of a dead frog dance by zapping them with a spark,
but the modern history behind the technology that allows our brains to
talk directly to machines goes back to the 1950s and John Lilly. He
implanted several hundred electrodes into different parts of a monkey’s
brain and used these implants to apply shocks, causing different body
parts to move. A decade later in 1963, professor Jose Delgado of Yale
tested this theory again like a true Spaniard, stepping into the ring to
face a charging bull, which he stopped in its tracks with a zap to the brain.
In 1969, professor Eberhard Fetz was able to isolate and record the
firing of a single neuron onto a microelectrode he had implanted into
the brain of a monkey. Fetz learned that primates could actually tune
their brain activity to better interact with the implanted machine. He
rewarded them with banana pellets every time they triggered the
microelectrode, and the primates quickly improved in their ability to
activate this specific section of their brain. This was a critical
observation, demonstrating brain’s unique plasticity, its ability to
create fresh pathways to fit a new language.
Today, BMI research has
advanced to not only record the neurons firing in primates’ brains, but
to understand what actions the firing of those neurons represent. "I
spend my life chasing the storms that emanate from the hundreds of
billions of cells that inhabit our brains," explained Miguel Nicolelis, PhD, one of the founders of Center for Neuroengineering
at Duke University and the driving force behind the Walk Again Project.
"What we want to do is listen to these brain symphonies and try to
extract them from the messages they carry."
Nicolelis and his colleagues at
Duke were able to record brain activity and match it to actions. From
there they could translate that brain activity into instructions a
computer could understand. Beginning in the year 2000, Nicolelis and
his colleagues at Duke made a series of breakthroughs. In the most well
known, they implanted a monkey with an array of microelectrodes that
could record the firing of clusters of neurons in different parts of the
brain. The monkey stood on a treadmill and began to walk. On the other
side of the planet, a robot in Japan received the signal emanating from
the primate’s brain and began to walk.
Primates
in the Duke lab learned to control robotic arms using only their
thoughts. And like in the early experiments done by Fetz, the primates
showed a striking ability to improve the control of these new limbs.
"The brain is a remarkable instrument," says professor Craig Henriquez,
who helped to found the Duke lab. "It has the ability to rewire itself,
to create new connections. That’s what gives the BMI paradigm its power.
You are not limited just by what you can physically engineer, because
the brain evolves to better suit the interface."
The present
After his success with
primates, Nicolelis was eager to apply the advances in BMI to people.
But there were some big challenges in the transition from lab animals to
human patients, namely that many people weren’t willing to undergo
invasive brain surgery for the purposes of clinical research. "There is
an open question of whether you need to have implants to get really fine
grained control," says Henriquez. The Walk Again Project hopes to
answer that question, at least partially. While it is based on research
in animals that required surgery, it will be using only external EEG
headsets to gather brain activity.
The fact that these patients
were paralyzed presented another challenge. Unlike the lab monkeys, who
could move their own arms and observe how the robot arm moved in
response, these participants can’t move their legs, or for many, really
remember the subconscious thought process that takes place when you want
to travel by putting one foot in front of the other. The first step was
building up the pathways in the brain that would send mental commands
to the BMI to restore locomotion.
To train the patients in this
new way of thinking about movement, researchers turned to virtual
reality. Each subject was given an EEG headset and an Oculus Rift.
Inside the head-mounted display, the subjects saw a virtual avatar of
themselves from the waist down. When they thought about walking, the
avatar legs walked, and this helped the brain to build new connections
geared towards controlling the exoskeleton. "We also simulate the
stadium, and the roar of the crowd," says Regis Kopper, who runs Duke’s
VR lab. "To help them prepare for the stress of the big day."
Once
the VR training had established a baseline for sending commands to the
legs, there was a second hurdle. Much of walking happens at the level of
reflex, and without the peripheral nervous system that helps people
balance, coordinate, and adjust to the terrain, walking can be a very
challenging task. That’s why even the most advanced robots have trouble navigating stairs
or narrow hallways that would seem simple to humans. If the patients
were going to successfully walk or kick a ball, it wasn’t enough that
they be able to move the exoskeleton’s legs — they had to feel them as
well.
The breakthrough was a special
shirt with vibrating pads on its forearm. As the robot walked, the
contact of its heel and toe on the ground made corresponding sensations
occur along parts of the right and left arms. "The brain essentially
remapped one part of the body onto another," says Henriquez. "This
restored what we call proprioception, the spacial awareness humans need
for walking."
In recent weeks all eight of
the test subjects have successfully walked using the exoskeleton, with
one completing an astonishing 132 steps. The plan is to have the
volunteer who works best with the exoskeleton perform the opening kick.
But the success of the very public demonstration is still up in the air.
The suit hasn’t been completely finished and it has yet to be tested in
an outdoor environment. The group won't confirm who exactly will be
wearing the suit. Nicolelis, for his part, isn’t worried. Asked when he
thought the entire apparatus would be ready, he replied: "Thirty minutes
before."
The future
The Walk Again project may be
the most high-profile example of BMI, but there have been a string of
breakthrough applications in recent years. A patient at the University of Pittsburgh
achieved unprecedented levels of fine motor control with a robotic arm
controlled by brain activity. The Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago
introduced the world’s first mind controlled prosthetic leg. For now the use of advanced BMI technologies is largely confined to academic and medical research, but some projects, like DARPA’s Deka arm,
have received FDA approval and are beginning to move into the real
world. As it improves in capability and comes down in cost, BMI may
open the door to a world of human enhancement that would see people
merging with machines, not to restore lost capabilities, but to augment
their own abilities with cyborg power-ups.
"From the standpoint of
defense, we have a lot of good reasons to do it," says Alan Rudolph, a
former DARPA scientist and Walk Again Project member. Rudolph, for
example, worked on the Big Dog,
and says BMI may allow human pilots to control mechanical units with
their minds, giving them the ability to navigate uncertain or dynamic
terrain in a way that has so far been impossible while keeping soldiers
out of harms way. Our thoughts might control a robot on the surface of
Mars or a microsurgical bot navigating the inside of the human body.
There is a subculture of DIY biohackers and grinders
who are eager to begin adopting cyborg technology and who are willing,
at least in theory, to amputate functional limbs if it’s possible to
replace them with stronger, more functional, mechanical ones. "I know
what the limits of the human body are like," says Tim Sarver, a member
of the Pittsburgh biohacker collective Grindhouse Wetwares. "Once you’ve
seen the capabilities of a 5000psi hydraulic system, it’s no
comparison."
For now, this sci-fi vision
all starts with a single kick on the World Cup pitch, but our inevitable
cyborg future is indeed coming. A recent demonstration
at the University of Washington enabled one person’s thoughts to
control the movements of another person’s body — a brain-to-brain
interface — and it holds the key to BMI’s most promising potential
application. "In this futuristic scenario, voluntary electrical brain
waves, the biological alphabet that underlies human thinking, will
maneuver large and small robots, control airships from afar," wrote
Nicolelis. "And perhaps even allow for the sharing of thoughts and
sensations with one individual to another."
Surfboards lean against a wall at the Google office in Santa Monica, California, October 11, 2010.
Credit: Reuters/Lucy Nicholson
(Reuters) - Google
Inc updated its terms of service on Monday, informing users that their
incoming and outgoing emails are automatically analyzed by software to create targeted ads.
The revisions more explicitly spell out the manner in which Googlesoftware
scans users' emails, both when messages are stored on Google's servers
and when they are in transit, a controversial practice that has been at
the heart of litigation.
Last
month, a U.S. judge decided not to combine several lawsuits that
accused Google of violating the privacy rights of hundreds of millions
of email users into a single class action.
Users of Google's Gmail email service
have accused the company of violating federal and state privacy and
wiretapping laws by scanning their messages so it could compile secret
profiles and target advertising. Google has argued that users implicitly consented to its activity, recognizing it as part of the email delivery process.
Google spokesman Matt Kallman said in a statement that the changes "will give people even greater clarity and are based on feedback we've received over the last few months."
Google's
updated terms of service added a paragraph stating that "our automated
systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you
personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailoredadvertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.
There is no point in kidding ourselves, now, about Who Has the Power. – Hunter S. Thompson, jacket copy, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
The Internet wasn’t supposed to be so…Machiavellian.
In 1963, Stewart Brand
and his wife set out on a landmark road trip, the goal of which was to
educate and enliven the people they encountered with tools for modern
living. The word “tools” was taken liberally. Brand wrote that “a realm
of intimate, personal power is developing.” Any tool that created or
channeled such power was useful. Tools meant books, maps, professional journals, courses, classes, and more.
In 1968, Brand founded the Whole Earth Catalog (WEC), an underground
magazine of sorts that would scale in a way no road-weary Dodge ever
could. The first issue was 64 pages and cost $5. It opened with the
phrase: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”
A year after WEC’s start, on October 29, 1969, the first packet of data was sent from UCLA to SRI International. It was called ARPAnet
at the time, but with it the Internet was born. Brand and others would
come to see the Internet as the essential, defining “tool” of their
generation. Until its final issue in 1994, the WEC’s 32 editions provide
as good a chronicle of the emergence of cyberculture (as it was then
called) as you can find.
Cyberculture. It’s a curious and complicated term in today’s society,
isn’t it? Cyberculture is at once completely outdated and awfully
relevant.
As Fred Turner has argued,
Brand is a key figure in the weaving together of two major cultural
fabrics that have since split — counterculture and cyberculture. Brand
is also immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as a member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. And Brand famously assisted researcher Doug Engelbart with the “Mother of all Demos,” the outline of a vision for technology prosthetics that improve human life; it would define computing for decades to come.
The Merry Pranksters, still from the movie Magic Trip
Brand attended Phillips Exeter Academy — an elite East Coast high
school, and an institution of traditional power if there ever was one.
He was a parachutist in the U.S. Army. He graduated with a degree in
biology from Stanford, studied design at San Francisco Art Institute and
photography at San Francisco State. He also participated in legal
studies of LSD and its effects with Timothy Leary.
That’s hardly the typical resume of a technologist or an entrepreneur
or an investor. But it should be. The business of making culture has
been for too long now controlled by people who live outside it.
It is my opinion that the Internet of today can and must be
countercultural again, that cyberculture should — needs to be —
countercultural.
That word,countercultural,carries with it
the connotation of liberal idealism and societal marginalia. Yet, the
new countercultures we’re seeing online today are profoundly mainstream,
and drawn along wholly different political lines. The Internet is its
own party. The Internet has its own set of beliefs. Springs have sprung
the world over and this isn’t simply a nerd thing anymore. We all care
passionately about Internet life and Internet liberty and the continual
pursuit of happiness both online and off.
Yet if the Internet is a measure of our culture, our zeitgeist, then
what does it tell us about the spirit of this age? Our zeitgeist
certainly isn’t what’s trending; it’s not another quiz of which TV
character you are; it’s not another listicle. I changed the global power
structure and all I got was this lousy t-shirt. And Facebook. And
Twitter.
What is this generation’s Rolling Stone? What is our Whole Earth
Catalog? It’s an important question because if the Internet is defining
our culture, and our use of it defines our society, then we have a
responsibility to ensure and propel its transformative impact, to
understand the ways cyberculture can and should be the counterculture
driving change rather than just distracting us from it.
There are beacons of hope. I eagerly await Jon Evans’ fantastic column in these pages each weekend for reasons like this.
The Daily Dot, a
publication I co-founded, documents today’s cyberculture through the
lens of online communities — virtual locales in which we arguably
“reside” more deliberately than any geography. You should also be
reading Edge, N+1, and Dangerous Minds. Even Vanity Fair has turned its eye to this theme, successfully I think, with articles like this. Rolling Stone is doing a pretty good job of being Rolling Stone these days, too.
I’m terminally optimistic, and I believe that counter-cyber-culture
is inherently optimistic, as well. Even despite the U.S. government’s
overreaching on privacy and “protecting” us from data about our own
bodies, despite Silicon Valley’s mad rush to cash in on apps rather than
substantial technology, despite most online media’s drastic descent to
the lowest common denominator and even lower standards of journalism, I
remain…optimistic.
We have found a courage in our growing numbers online. People old and
young can be be bold and defining on the Internet, underwritten by the
emotional support of peers everywhere. We’re voting for what we want the
world to be, and how we want it to be. Why do you think Kickstarter
works so well? We fund things that without our help are unlikely to
exist, but ought to nonetheless. Our “likes” and “shares” are ultimately
becoming votes for the kind of future we want to live in, and I’m
optimistic that we will ultimately wield that responsibility with
meaning and thoughtfully.
Tumblr. 4chan. Etsy. YouTube. We have emigrated to these outlying
territories seeking religious freedoms, cultural freedoms, and personal
freedoms alike. We colonized, and are still colonizing, new environs
each day and every week. We claim and reclaim the Internet like so many
tribal boundaries.
We’re winning more often than not, thank goodness. Aaron Swartz heroically beat SOPA and PIPA against all odds. Yahoo won against PRISM. The Internet won against cancer…with pizza. My godmother knows what Tor is.
The virtual reality community rebelled when princely Oculus sold to
Facebook, for the reason that VR is a new superpower and a new
countercultural medium that we’re afraid might have fallen into the
wrong hands (I don’t believe that’s actually the case, but that’s
grounds for another post altogether).
So, yes. A countercultural moment all our own stares us in the face.
Like Brand, I hope we can manage to be politically aware and socially
responsible in a way that technology begs us to be, without giving
ground to the idea that the Internet is anything but ours.
Civil disobedience is a different game when the means of production
and dissemination have been fully democratized. We seek differentiated
high ground from which to defend our values. We build new back channels
to communicate unencumbered. Instead of making catalogues, we make new
categories. We wield technology, perhaps unaware on whose shoulders we
stand, but at the same time free from the anxiety of influence.
We aspire to be more pure in that sense. We want and we give and we need and we will have…pure Internet.
Editor’s note:Josh Jones-Dilworth is a co-founder of the Daily Dot; founder and CEO of Jones-Dilworth, Inc., an early-stage technology marketing consultancy; and co-founder of Totem, a startup changing PR for the better. Follow his blog here.
Featured image by Kundra/Shutterstock; Hunter S. Thompson image by Wikimedia Commons user MDCarchives (own work) under a CC-BY-SA-3.0 license
Complimentary Wi-Fi is so commonplace that a business advertising its
“hotspot” in the window seems somewhat passé. But a new hotspot
location should impress even the most jaded among us: For the first
time, scientists have demonstrated it’s possible to beam a wireless
Internet signal across the 238,900 miles separating Earth from the moon.
The demonstration, done by researchers at NASA and MIT, means that
future moon explorers could theoretically check in at Mare Imbrium and
post lunar selfies with greater speed than you do from your home
network.
The team will present its findings June 9 at the CLEO laser technology conference in California.
Not Your Starbucks Wi-Fi
In order to bring broadband to the moon, scientists used four
separate telescopes based in New Mexico to send an uplink signal to a
receiver mounted on a satellite orbiting the moon. Each telescope is
about 6 inches in diameter and is fed by a laser transmitter that beams
information in coded pulses of infrared light.
Since our atmosphere bends the signal as it travels to the moon, the
four telescopes transmit the light through different columns of air,
each with different bending effects. This setup increases the chance
that at least one of the laser beams will interact with the receiver,
and establish a connection with the moon.
And if you’re fixing to binge on Netflix on the moon, the connection
isn’t too bad, either. Scientists managed to send data from Earth to the
moon at a rate of 19.44 megabits per second — on par with slower
broadband speeds — and could download information from the moon at a
rate of whopping 622 megabits per second. According to Wired UK, that’s over 4,000 times faster than current radio transmission speeds.
So, in light of all that, there’s really only question that remains… “What’s the password?”
The Internet of Things is coming. And the tech cognoscenti aren’t sure that’s a good thing.
For years, the prospect of an online world that extends beyond
computers, phones, and tablets and into wearables, thermostats, and
other devices has generated plenty of excitement and activity. But now,
some of the brightest tech minds are expressing some doubts about the
potential impact on everything from security and privacy to human
dignity and social inequality.
That’s the conclusion of a new survey from the Pew Research Center.
For ten years, the Washington, D.C. think tank has surveyed thousands of
technology experts–like founding father Vint Cerf and Microsoft social
media scholar danah boyd–about the future of the Internet. But while
previous editions have mostly expressed optimism, this year people
started expressing more concern. “We had a lot of warnings, a lot of
people pushing back,” says Janna Anderson, co-author of the report.
The Internet of Broken Things
The 1,606 respondents said they saw many potential benefits to the
Internet of Things. New voice- and gesture-based interfaces could make
computers easier to use. Medical devices and health monitoring services
could help prevent and treat diseases. Environmental sensors could
detect pollution. Salesforce.com chief scientist JP Rangaswami said that
improved logistics and planning systems could reduce waste.
But most of the experts warned of downsides as well. Security was one
of the most immediate concerns. “Most of the devices exposed on the
internet will be vulnerable,” wrote Jerry Michalski, founder of the
think tank REX.
“They will also be prone to unintended consequences: they will do
things nobody designed for beforehand, most of which will be
undesirable.”
Beyond security concerns, there’s the threat of building a world that
may be too complex for our own good. If you think error messages and
applications crashes are a problem now, just wait until the web is
embedded in everything from your car to your sneakers. Like the VCR that
forever blinks 12:00, many of the technologies built into the devices
of the future may never be used properly. “We will live in a world where
many things won’t work and nobody will know how to fix them,” wrote
Howard Rheingold.
So Many Left Behind
That complexity could also leave many people behind. Developing
nations–precisely the ones that could most benefit from IoT’s
environmental benefits–will be least able to afford them, says Miguel
Alcaine, an International Telecommunication Union area representative
for Central America. In an interview, Pew’s Internet & American Life
Project director Lee Raine pointed out that the IoT could lead to a
much larger digital divide, one in which those who cannot or choose not
to participate are shut out entirely from many daily activities. What
happens when you need a particular device to pay for items at your local
convenience store?
Meanwhile, those that do partake in the IoT may find it dehumanizing,
especially in the workplace. We’ve already seen some companies explore
the possibility of monitoring their employees
through wearables. “The danger will be in loss of privacy and a
reduction of people into numbers: the dark side of the quantified self,”
wrote Andrew Chen, a computer information systems professor of at
Minnesota State University. Peter R. Jacoby, an English professor at San
Diego Mesa College, summed up this line of thought bluntly: “By 2025,
we will have long ago give up our privacy. The Internet of Things will
demand–and we will give willingly–our souls.”
The Counterargument
Not everyone thinks this loss of privacy is inevitable. Harvard
fellow David “Doc” Searls argues that we needn’t sacrifice our privacy
in order to enjoy the advantages of connected devices. There’s no reason
that all devices must connect to the internet as opposed to private
networks. And even those that are connected to the public internet could
use encryption to talk to private servers, protecting your data from
large companies.
“People’s Clouds of Things can be as personal and private as their
houses (and, when encrypted, even more so),” he wrote. “They can also be
far more social than any ‘social network’ because they won’t involve
centralized control of the kind that Facebook, Google, and Twitter
provide.”
Searls imagines a world with more fine-tuned control over not just
privacy, but the terms of service that govern the products we consume
today. We’ve already seen some progress towards such a vision with
open-source Internet of Things projects such as Spark, Tessel, Skynet and Nodered.
The question is whether these types of platforms can be used to build
truly open consumer products, and, if so, whether anyone will want to
use them.
The Hypometer
It’s also possible that the Internet of Things will fail to take off
in any meaningful way. “The Internet of Things has been in the red zone
of the hypometer for over a decade now,” Bill St. Arnaud, a
self-employed green internet consultant wrote. “Yes, there will be many
niche applications, but it will not be the next big thing, as many
pundits predict.”
An unnamed co-founder of a consultancy with practices in internet
technology and biomedical engineering agreed. “Inter-networked wearables
will remain a toy for the wealthy,” he wrote. He thinks wearables and
other connected devices will be useful for the military, hospitals,
prisons and other niche operations, but he doesn’t expect them to be
particularly life-changing.
Justin Reich, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for
Internet & Society, hedged his bets. “I’m not sure that moving
computers from people’s pockets (smartphones) to people’s hands or face
will have the same level of impact that the smartphone has had,” he
wrote. “But things will trend in a similar direction. Everything that
you love and hate about smartphones will be more so.”
The internet will have nearly 3 billion users, about 40 percent of the world's population, by the end of 2014, according to a new report from the United Nations International Telecommunications Union. Two-thirds of those users will be in developing countries.
Those numbers refer to people who have used the internet in the last three months, not just those who have access to it.
Internet penetration is
reaching saturation in developed countries, while it's growing rapidly
in developing countries. Three out of four people in Europe will be
using the internet by the end of the year, compared to two out of three
in the Americas and one in three in Asia and the Pacific. In Africa,
nearly one in five people will be online by the end of the year.
Mobile phone subscriptions will
reach almost 7 billion. That growth rate is slowing, suggesting that
the number will plateau soon. Mobile internet subscriptions are still
growing rapidly, however, and are expected to reach 2.3 billion by the
end of 2014.
These numbers make it easy to
imagine a future in which every human on Earth is using the internet.
The number of people online will still be dwarfed by the number of
things, however. Cisco estimates the internet already has 10 billion
connected devices and is expected to hit 50 billion by 2020.
Forensic experts have long been able to match a series of prints to
the hand that left them, or a bullet to the gun that fired it. Now, the
same thing is being done with the photos taken by digital cameras, and
is ushering in a new era of digital crime fighting.
New technology is now allowing law enforcement officers to search
through any collection of images to help track down the identity of
photo-taking criminals, such as smartphone thieves and child
pornographers.
Investigations in the past have shown that a digital photo can be
paired with the exact same camera that took it, due to the patterns of
Sensor Pattern Noise (SPN) imprinted on the photos by the camera's
sensor.
Since each pattern is idiosyncratic, this allows law enforcement to
"fingerprint" any photos taken. And once the signature has been
identified, the police can track the criminal across the Internet,
through social media and anywhere else they've kept photos.
Researchers have grabbed photos from Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr,
Google+, and personal blogs to see whether one individual image could be
matched to a specific user's account.
In a paper
entitled "On the usage of Sensor Pattern Noise for Picture-to-Identity
linking through social network accounts", the team argues that "digital
imaging devices have gained an important role in everyone's life, due to
a continuously decreasing price, and of the growing interest on photo
sharing through social networks"
Today, "everyone continuously leaves visual 'traces' of his/her
presence and life on the Internet, that can constitute precious data for
forensic investigators."
The researchers were able to match a photo with a specific person 56
per cent of the time in their experiment, which examined 10 different
people's photos found on two separate websites each.
The team concludes that the technique has yielded a "promising result,"
which demonstrates that such it has "practical value for forensic
practitioners".
While the certainty of the technique is only just better than chance,
the technology is pretty new, and the numbers could get a bit more
promising in the future. And, like fingerprints, the SPN signature would
likely only be a part of the case being brought against a suspect.
Science, man. An international team of scientists have made a major breakthrough in synthetic biology.
For the first time ever, they were able to insert a man-made,
custom-built chromosome into brewer's yeast to not only create a life
form but one that also passes down its man-made genes to its offspring.
We're closer to creating artificial life.
Scientists have previously made chromosomes for bacteria and viruses
but this is the first time they've been able to build a chromosome for
something more complex. Called eukaryotic chromosomes, they have a
nucleus and are found in plants, animals and humans.
The artificial chromosome, called synIII after the chromosome three in brewer's yeast it replaced, was stitched together via a computer by a team of scientists
over a period of seven years. They basically redesigned the whole damn
thing piece by piece. The scientist liken man-made chromosomes to the
idea that you could shuffle genes into them like a deck of cards.
The
yeast cells that contained the designer chromosomes behaved as normally
as, well, normal yeast cells only that they could theoretically be
improved and do things normal yeast cells could not. Potentially,
scientists could create man-made versions of all the chromosomes in
organisms thus creating artificial life.
Donghee Son and Jongha Lee - Wearable sensors have until now been unable to store data locally.
Researchers have created a wearable device that is as thin as a
temporary tattoo and can store and transmit data about a person’s
movements, receive diagnostic information and release drugs into skin.
Similar efforts to develop ‘electronic skin’ abound, but the device
is the first that can store information and also deliver medicine —
combining patient treatment and monitoring. Its creators, who report
their findings today in Nature Nanotechnology1, say that the technology could one day aid patients with movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease or epilepsy.
The
researchers constructed the device by layering a package of stretchable
nanomaterials — sensors that detect temperature and motion, resistive
RAM for data storage, microheaters and drugs — onto a material that
mimics the softness and flexibility of the skin. The result was a sticky
patch containing a device roughly 4 centimetres long, 2 cm wide and 0.3
millimetres thick, says study co-author Nanshu Lu, a mechanical
engineer at the University of Texas in Austin.
“The novelty is really in the integration of the memory device,” says
Stéphanie Lacour, an engineer at the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology in Lausanne, who was not involved in the work. No other
device can store data locally, she adds.
The trade-off for that memory milestone is that the device works only if
it is connected to a power supply and data transmitter, both of which
need to be made similarly compact and flexible before the prototype can
be used routinely in patients. Although some commercially available
components, such as lithium batteries and radio-frequency identification
tags, can do this work, they are too rigid for the soft-as-skin brand
of electronic device, Lu says.
Even if softer components were available, data transmitted wirelessly
would need to be converted into a readable digital format, and the
signal might need to be amplified. “It’s a pretty complicated system to
integrate onto a piece of tattoo material,” she says. “It’s still pretty
far away.”
Totally paralysed people will be able to take part, using a brain-computer interface
The first Cybathlon, an Olympics for bionic athletes, will take place in Switzerland in October 2016.
The event will include a race where competitors control an avatar via a brain interface.
There will also be races for competitors wearing prosthetic limbs and exo-skeletons.
Hosted by the Swiss National Competence Center of Research,
it is hoped the competition will spur interest in human
performance-enhancing technology.
More people are walking again thanks to exo-skeletons
The brain-computer interface race is designed for competitors
who are paralysed from the neck down. They will control an avatar in a
computer racing game via a headset that connects the brain to a
computer.
There will also be races for those wearing arm or leg prosthetics, an exoskeleton race and a wheelchair race.
The assistive devices worn by the athletes, who will be known
as pilots, can either be ones that are already commercially available
or prototypes from research labs.
There will be two medals for each competition, one for the pilot and one for company that developed the device.
There will also be a wheelchair race
Bionic limbs and exoskeletons are becoming much more
technically advanced, offering those wearing them much more realistic
movements.
Prof Hugh Herr, from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, showed off some of the prosthetics that his team have been
working on at the Ted (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference
in Vancouver last week.
He is currently in negotiations with health care
professionals to get the bionic limbs more widely available to those who
need them.
Pilots with arm prosthetics will be able to compete
Often though there was a disconnect between technology and
patients, said Prof Robert Riener, event organiser, from the University
of Switzerland.
"The idea is that we want to push development of assistive
technologies towards devices that patients can really use in everyday
life," he told the BBC.
"Some of the current technologies look very fancy but are a long way from being practical and user-friendly," he added.
The other main aim of the games is to allow people to compete who have never had the opportunity before.
"We allow technology that has previously been excluded from
the Paralympics. By making it a public event we want to get rid of the
borders between patients, society and the technology community," Prof
Riener said.
