Brainstorm (directed by Douglas Turnbull, the man behind the special effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and now IMAX Suprimo) is a flawed but interesting film about tech product development. We see the team go through the excitement of research and development, from clunky prototype to marketable product, and to the inevitable final stage – military funding/take over and exploitation of the application for nefarious ends.

Scientists Lillian Reynolds (Louise Fletcher at her chain smoking best) and Michael Brace (Christopher Walken holding down his mad dog thing) develop a method for recording lived experience on holographic tape which can be then played back directly inside someone else’s head. Going far beyond the modest ambitions of a computer generated virtual reality environment, the process produces the effect of total immersion in another’s thoughts, feelings and full sensory experiences. The potential and intended uses are all very commendable – for the first time, people would have the opportunity to really be able to understand each other’s points of view and ways of seeing the world. However, in keeping with the history of representational technologies, someone very quickly records the experience of having sex, and someone else works out how to play it back to themselves on permanent loop. And in a scene guaranteed to make you all feel good about your own rubbish parenting; Christopher Walken’s son manages to plug himself into a military recording of what it’s like to be horribly tortured.

Dr. Reynolds is such a dedicated workaholic that half way through the movie she manages to hook herself up to the recording device while suffering from a fatal heart-attack. Brace then becomes obsessed with experiencing the death tape for himself, on the premise that it will let him experience some kind of universal truth about what happens when you die. I don’t want to give away the ending, but one of the writers (Bruce Rubin) was responsible for the equally gushy and literally Christian finish to the otherwise great Jacobs Ladder and the entirely schmaltzy Ghost.

James R. Porter, 69, an admitted sex offender and Catholic priest is awaiting a hearing in civil commitment procedures to determine if he should be confined, perhaps for the rest of his life. The outcome could be largely determined by testing with a penile plethysmograph, a device that measures sexual excitement.

Invented by a Czech psychologist around 1957, the device was nearly abandoned in the mid-1980s, when child advocates claimed the pictures used during testing violated child pornography laws, said Dr. Peter Byrne, a Utah-based psychologist and P-graph historian.

The revival came when a Canadian researcher analyzed thousands of sex offenders and published in the late 1990s an actuarial formula to predict recidivism. The most reliable indicator, according to the study, is whether a sexual offender still has deviant arousal to prepubescent children even after receiving treatment.

SouthCoastToday

University of Arizona researchers are developing an airborne visual navigation system by using neuromorphic engineering to create electronic clones of insect vision processing systems in analog integrated circuits.

The circuits create insect-like self-motion estimation, obstacle avoidance, target tracking and other visual behaviors on two model blimps.

Could treat eye diseases better than drops

BayBlade writes "It seems a lost Ed Wood film, Necromania was recovered recently, and can now be ordered on DVD. Reuters goes into more depth."

Each glass found to afford 13% protection

Smokers often say that lighting up a cigarette can calm their nerves, satisfy their craving and help them relax. Now, a team of University of Michigan scientists is reporting new evidence of why that might be: Smoking produces major changes in the flow of "feel good" chemicals between brain cells, both temporarily and long-term.

At least 40 new potential cognitive enhancer drugs are currently in clinical development.

These breakthroughs could turn out to be lifesavers or at least postpone the development of a devastating disease such as Alzheimer's.

But who else should be allowed to take them?

New research is speeding the development of devices using brain-computer interfaces (BCI) that may allow people completely paralyzed by neurodegenerative diseases to regain some movement or ability to communicate with those around them....

JazMuadDib writes "Scientists expected a few rough spots when their space drone snapped close-range images of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Instead, the planetlike moon appears to have a bizarre, mysteriously smooth surface, and Tuesday's images have left them in a state of wonder. Read more at the Tucson Citizen." NASA's Cassini pages have a wide assortment of images and analysis. Cassini's data has already thrown scientists for loop.

Last week we begged IBM to give us the deets on the Linux watch they promised years ago, this week we’re gearing up to see if they’re telling the truth next time we see them with The Truth Detector Watch.

Using built in bio-sensors, you ask the potential fibber to hold their fingers on the watch, ask them a question and depending on the bars display, they might be lying to you.

Why we like it
Yah, it’s probably does really work, but just rolling in with one of these in the next meeting when Bob tries to lay down his crummy forecasts for next year is worth it to freak him out.

Where to get it and how much
SmartHome, for $15.99, it’s not a bad deal for falsehood probing and the lying liars who lie.

Fascinating talk by Rebecca Allen from MIT media lab in Dublin.

She first talked about one of the piece here in Ars Futura: developed with Ronan Coyle and Hannes Nehls, Liminal Identity blurs the boundaries between the physical and the virtual worlds.
So there's this shipping box with 2 holes, you put your head inside one of the hole and can see the face of another person who put his head inside the hole too, but the result is an image that mixed both your and his/her identities.

Moreover, the box is "stealing" the image to display it elsewhere, and you see it floating like a ghost among other faces.

Then there's also here a new kind of interface that you activate just using your breath, you blow and see the virtual reality lanscape change: the weather turns sunny or bad, for example.

That's what Rebecca Allan calls Augmented Virtuality. So far, you thought it was cool to talk about augmented reality, but she's working on augmented virtuality where we have a virtual world that we enhance with video images of face or with our own breath.

A Romanian father-of-five needed medical help after he superglued a condom to his penis. Nicolae Popovici, 43, told doctors he didn't want any more children, reports National newspaper. He and his wife decided to use contraception but the condom they bought was too big so he stuck it on with glue. He and his wife decided to use contraception but the condom they bought was too big so he stuck it on with glue. After sex, the man realised he couldn't remove the condom and went to his village's medical clinic for help. A nurse said: "He even said that he thought the condom could be used several times and that he wanted it stuck on his penis so he could use it again later. We barely managed to remove it in the end."

First, a NYTimes article describing how the NYPD is expanding DNA collection & testing beyond murder & rape crimes, thanks to grant money from the National Institute for Justice. The article reports that property crimes often yield cleaner genetic samples, increasing the likelihood of a match with DNA profiles in their database.

Cameraphone voyeurism reaches new heights!

A new mobile phone gadget has raised fears it will be a perverts' dream. The £100 add-on will turn camera phones into X-ray specs which can see through clothes, according to Scotland's Daily Record.

"It is said to be particularly effective on dark bikinis. Originally designed for taking pictures at night, it has quickly been exploited by voyeurs.

Night-filters are the latest device used by Japan's obsessive voyeur community.Made by Japanese company Yamada Denshi, it can be bought on the internet and fitted to high-end phones.

In particular, Vodafone's V602-SH handset, not yet available in the UK, is being used with the new gadget.

Vodafone say they are deeply unhappy about the device. It is not illegal in itself - but using it to film people's naked bodies would be.

The cameras effectively give users night vision by picking up on heat to create outline pictures. Because bodies are hotter than clothes, the pictures produce an image of the body without the clothes.

Vodafone deny responsibility and have condemned the abuse of camera-phone technology.

Picture from Advanced Intelligence.

Research from Penn State and the University of Pittsburgh have found that web users are searching more for business and e-commerce resources, and less for sex and pornography.

So is this guy...

Melt

Melt, by Slavica Ceperkovic and Nicholas Stedman, is a telematic installation in which the touch of a person in one country melts a block of ice in another. A table with embedded sensors registers the touch of installation visitors in France, which is then transferred and translated through the Internet and activates heat sensors embedded in a block of ice in Canada. The ice traces the presence of the visitors through melting and refreezing. The image of the ice can be seen via a live web stream projected in the space in France, so that the visitor can see their impact. This piece was installed with the sensor station at Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains in Lille, France, and the receiving station at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff, Canada. To see documentation stills and video visit the websites of Slavica Ceperkovic and Nicholas Stedman.

A one-metre-tall species of human living as recently as 13,000 years ago radically alters the picture of human evolution

The premise is that a turntable can function as a random access input device, anthropomorphic in scale and thus well suited for manipulation by hand.

Nikita Pashenkov: Optical Turntable as an Interface for Musical Performance (PDF - 83 pages)

^Any visual material can be played on the optical turntable. For instance cut outs of a topographical map.

See also: Projects: Spinalcat

Related: Dislocation: Cut-Up Cartography & Turntable sans vinyl

via Gizmodo

University of Pittsburgh researchers have demonstrated that a monkey can feed itself with a robotic arm simply by using signals from its brain. The scientists placed food at various locations and the animal "thought" the movements that triggered the arm.

The robotic arm moved like a natural one, with a fully mobile shoulder and elbow and a simple gripper that allowed the monkey to grasp and hold food, while its own arms were restrained.

The arm was wired into the animal's brain and intercepted signals through electrodes attached to tiny probes that tap into the animal's neuronal pathways in the motor cortex.

The neurons' activity was fed through an algorithm that interpreted the activity in the monkey's brain as it tried to move its own arm, and transmitted the signals to the robotic arm.

The experiment might someday lead to devices that could help people who are paralyzed or who have lost limbs.

Via The Guardian and Wired.
Other poor monkey stories: Injection of workaholism, Monkeys and video games.

Los Angeles-based company Allerca is now taking reservations (costs $3,500!) for the world's first genetically engineered hypoallergenic cats.

The hypoallergenic cat is the first of a planned series of lifestyle pets that ALLERCA will develop over the next few years.

Via Futurismic < Slashdot and Press Release.

International meeting: Dalí. New Frontiers of Science, Art and
Thought - November 2-3, 2004 at the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation of
Figueres

This international encounter intends to bring to light some of the up-to-date investigations on the relations between art and science, and to debate on the reflections that presents the new alliance among art, science and technology in the contemporary thought, in relation with the work of the painter and writer from the empordà.

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) perhaps was one of the 20th century artists really interested in the science and the scientific thought. For all is known its fascination for the psychoanalysis, the theory of relativity, the discovery of the chain of the DNA, the math or the nuclear physics, that has remained reflected in his literary and artistic work.

The drug causes long-term developmental damage to mice, a study suggests, raising concerns over its use by pregnant women

Germany's cabinet is due to discuss a law that would regulate limited genetic testing for employees in jobs like construction or public transportation.

"It sets the conditions for the type of tests that can be conducted," said Heinz Putzhammer who worked on an early draft of the bill, still in discussion. "I think we're on the right track because the limiting of genetic tests is in any case necessary in order to protect the person or the private sphere."

But testing for symptoms of a disease is just a few steps away from tests that would help employers determine whether to hire someone based on their chance of developing a genetic disease.

Besides, the tests currently on the market to determine common genetic diseases are unreliable.

Countries like France, Norway, Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands and Austria have passed laws that either severely limit or outright forbid the use of a person's genetic information for anything other than medical or scientific purposes.

German opposition politicians said they want a similar law.

Via Deutsche Welle.

Guidance Interactive have created GlucoBoy, an attachment for the Nintendo GameBoy that monitors blood sugar levels.  Creator Paul Wessel noticed that his son, who was diagnosed with diabetes at age 3, carried his GameBoy everywhere.  Wessel figured, hey - why not just turn the thing into a blood sugar monitor?  He is also developing games that work with the GlucoBoy beyond the standard testing.  Finally, GameBoys that are not only sticky with candy and soda, but bloody with glucose tests!  Yummy.

Interface is an election-year sci-fi novel about a candidate who is remote-controlled by a biochip in his brain. Published in 1994 by "Stephen Bury", a pen name for Neal Stephenson and his uncle, the novel is a timely satire of the campaign and media symbiosis that renders elections vulnerable to manipulation.

Brazilian artist, Adriana Bertini, makes clothing and sculpture out of colored condoms. they are quite beautiful. if you're in Sweden, go to the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg in December to check them out.

The MFA thesis work by Andrew Coates is "inspired by ergonomics from mundance objects."

Reminded me Alessi's gas lighter.

Sensoryimpact.

Researchers at The University of Manchester and Chernogolovka, Russia have discovered the world's first single-atom-thick fabric, which reveals the existence of a new class of materials and may lead to computers made from a single molecule. The research is to be published in Science on 22 October.

In the "Massive Change" exhibition that opened at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Bruce Mau shows how design promises to improve the human condition.

"In nearly every field that design touches, the long-term developments that we can see are hugely positive," says Mau.

Whether it is global warming, homelessness, oppressive governments or traffic jams, designers have a way to dispense with these problems in coming years, with solutions ranging from vegetables modified to become edible vaccines to factory-built housing for 21st-century megacities. In "Massive Change," anybody who helps develop the capacity for progress qualifies as a designer, whether it's a computer scientist working on open-source software or an animal breeder creating a featherless chicken better able to survive in hot climates.

"On the one hand, the mood of the day seemed to be very negative around the world," says Mau. "But at the same time, I saw designers doing work with the capacity absolutely to change the world."

For Mr. Mau, it makes little sense to pull objects out of their social and political contexts. "There's this old notion of objects being somehow separate from their environments, from the flows that produce them and support them and absorb them. That idea is over."

Via The New York Times.

See also the massivechange website.

I finally found a picture of the "many-legged robot that crawls through intestines" and makes pictures of what it encounters.

The article in La Repubblica says you can swallow it with a glass of water.

It looks huge to me! It measures 20 mm x 10 and researchers are trying to make it smaller. In the future, the robot will be able to make small interventions too.

Data mining is often used by businesses such as retailers to find isolated trends buried into the mountains of data gathered at their cash registers. But this process cannot really be applied to science for discovering new materials even if you have huge databases describing all your previous experiments. This is why an interdisciplinary team of researchers and engineers at Purdue University is working on 'knowledge discovery', a new computer-aided product design method that uses supercomputing, AI and large 3D displays.

"Instead of mining for a nugget of gold, knowledge discovery is more like sifting through a warehouse filled with small gears, levers, etc., none of which is particularly valuable by itself. After appropriate assembly, however, a Rolex watch emerges from the disparate parts," said James Caruthers, a professor of chemical engineering.

The system allows researchers to interact with their data in their own languages and uses a 12x7 feet tiled wall to display the results. Read this summary for selected excerpts.

If you live in France, and soon elsewhere in Europe and in the U.S., and if you need a dental prosthesis, chances are good that RFID tags are involved in the manufacturing process, according to this article from the RFID Journal.

The tag is embedded by the dental lab in the cast which will be used to make the prosthesis. Then it is used to record the whole history of the crown, a process requested by a European sanitary regulation. Before delivering the bridge to your dentist, all the data is copied to a smart card that will be given to you.

The company is also studying the idea to put directly the tag inside the prosthesis. Maybe one day, when your dentist installs your new bridge, you'll also be the owner of a deactivated RFID tag inside it. This summary contains more details and a picture of the RFID tag used to record the life of your next crown.

And now for something completely different:

A fantastic love story has been recently unveiled in St.Petersburg. Psychiatrist Nikolai Boyarchuk said that he had copied the text of the story from the file of a female patient. The doctor said that the story that happened to Oksana Terletskaya was absolutely real. He added that it would not be immoral to write about it in press, because the woman either died or she would never return to live with humans again.

the woman named him Tang!!! -BT

Link (via New World Disorder)

ABC News online: "Singaporean doctors have used an injectable radioactive "BrachySil" chip to destroy malignant cells and prolong the lives of inoperable liver cancer patients."

Link (via KurzweilAI.net)

A video of the Sky Cutter.

Via Slashdot.
Picture.

Kidney stone photographs from the Louis C. Herring & Co. Kidney Stone Analysis Laboratory ("We Leave No Stone Unturned"). Painfully and surprisingly beautiful. There’s also poetry in their reports and analyses as well as in they way they describe the initial visual inspection of the stones:

“The true nidus is invisible because it is the first crystal or aggregate of crystals precipitated from solution and deposited at what eventually becomes the stone site. An “apparent nidus” is either a region from which crystalline forms radiate or the geometric center surrounded by concentric laminations.“

[via lonita’s links log]

The International Earthship Summit 2004 begins Oct. 29th to examine “earthships” and sustainable design. These structures are designed to recycle waste and use as little as possible of the Earth's resources when occupied. The walls are earth-filled tires with old, glass bottles and cans stuffed in the gaps for added insulation. The conference will visit Earthship Brighton, one of only two so far in Europe. Read More | Images | Event Info

Hybrid Earthship. Available for rent and for sale.

From releasing packs of Feral Robot Dogs that sniff out chemical contamination, to teaching Yale engineering students socially responsible design, from creating pollution-detecting Clear Skies Masks for bicycle riders, to co-authoring Biotech Hobbyist Magazine, Natalie Jeremijenko’s work merges engineering, biology and art to explore socio-political hot spots along the fault line where design meets information meets society.

It's Friday, and I think it's time you all learn where baby circuits come from. Mostly safe for work electronic components orgies after the jump.

Is it hot in here or is there just a short? (Thanks, Manx(x)!)

Scientists, who studied the lifestyle of over 1,300 American men, discovered that waterbed users were four times more likely to be infertile than non-users while electric blankets increased chances of infertility more than sevenfold.

The study also found that hot baths appeared to protect against infertility - a finding the researchers described as "surprising". But they found no connections between infertility and smoking, Jacuzzi use, vibration, coffee or tea or space heaters.

However, the scientists cautioned against changing behaviour based on the one, small study.

The Telegraph.

Now a Russian scientist who conducted research into the effect of bad language on water (!?!), found that swearing makes you impotent. "We then looked at heavy swearers, and found whenever men use these words in their daily life, this immediately leads to sexual dysfunctions, i.e. impotence. If a woman uses these words in her daily speech, she slowly begins transforming into a man, getting more hair and muscles."

The Register.

Protein° just announced their 2005 calendar and it is not your ordinary calendar. it's based on their Chromo™ system that identifies each day with a different color based on the phase of the moon, i.e. aqua blue = full moon, deep red = new moon etc. there were only 500 made so don't miss out on it.

You may have noticed that today is in fact, Friday. Oh well, who hasn't slipped on a deadline here and there. We've been seeing a ton of new, and updated materials resource sites on the net lately. This week on TT, we're serving them up piping hot. If your routine could use some new material, you've come to the right place.......

San Francisco art critic and artist Jonathon Keats (who, last year, put his brain for sale) is developing "a novel method of genetic engineering that may soon allow scientists to place God on the tree of life alongside every other species, including slime molds, fungi and humans."

The goal is "accurate placement ... of all deities worldwide, including the god commonly known as Yahweh, Jehovah and/or Allah," -- or, for scientific purposes, Divineus deus -- in order to end centuries of often violent conflict between faith and reason.

"The God Project" mixes process-based art (the artist conducted lab experiments, met with scientists and created and administrated the International Association for Divine Taxonomy), documentation (the work includes meticulous photographs and charts and a lab installation as art object) and Dada-esque performance.

"My hypothesis is that the gods pertain to a domain unto themselves different from the others," he says, but the question is, where?

"The God Project" opened at the Modernism gallery in San Francisco on Sept. 29.

Via Art Future < SF Gate,

Thomas DeMarse, a University of Florida biomedical engineer, has grown a living "brain" with 25,000 living neurons, or nerve cells, taken from a rat's brain and cultured inside a glass dish.

The "brain" can already interact with an F-22 fighter jet flight simulator through a plate called a multi-electrode array and a desktop computer.

To control the simulated aircraft, the neurons first receive information from the computer about flight conditions, then they analyze the data and respond by sending signals to the plane's controls. Those signals alter the flight path and new information is sent to the neurons, creating a feedback system.

Besides, researchers hope that a close watch of how brain cells interact will allow them to understand what causes neural disorders such as epilepsy and to determine noninvasive ways to intervene. As living computers, they may someday be used to fly small unmanned airplanes or handle tasks that are dangerous for humans. "If we can extract the rules of how these neural networks are doing computations like pattern recognition, we can apply that to create novel computing systems," DeMarse said.

Via Eurekalert.

Janine Benyus' 12 "Big Ideas" about Biomimicry (with links to things we've done on related topics), from her Poptech speech:

*Self assembly: water-based chemistry, designs which grow themselves; computers without carcinogens (from self-assembling silicates). Objects which fold themselves like proteins, self assembly from two dimensions to three. New ceramics

*Chemistry in Water: moving from inorganic solvents to water-based chemistry, such as the work of the Coates Lab and Cornell, making biodegreabable plastics out of CO2

*Solar Transformations: molecular-sized solar cells.

*The Power of Shape: the nautilus' logorhythmic spiral is influencing the design of turbine and fan blades, which can be made 50% more efficient; design for disassembly (with, for instance, Van der Wahls forces); color without pigments (peacock feathers) and cleansing without detergents (Lotus leaf paint)

*Materials as systems.

*Natural Selection as an Innovation Engine: evolutionary design and genetic algorythms.

*Material Upcycling

*Ecosystems that Grow Food and Fertility: Prairie Farms and Living Machines

*Energy Saving Movement and Transport

*Resilience and Healing

*Sensing and Responding

also featuring cameos by Saddam, Osama, and John Edwards [via]

The Machinist
trailer here
"One day, I had this image of a sleepless, intensely private individual trapped in his own personal hell," recalls screenwriter Scott Kosar (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Amityville Horror). "Meanwhile, there is an area in my neighborhood that I always found poetically desolate - an industrial park lined by railroad tracks. Passing a machine shop, I looked inside and saw workers laboring at their tasks like extensions of their machines. I had to wonder what stories were cooking behind all that protective headgear and those greasy coveralls. Suddenly these two ideas collided and left me with a question: do machinists have existential crises?"

In theatres October 22, 2004.

Interesting idea, a character study of a machinist who is (presumably) going crazy due to the psychological implications of his work.

"I hear there's rumours on the...uh...internets." - George W. Bush
http://www.rumorsontheinternets.com/

i'm slow on catching up with Bush's stupidity so you've probably already seen this -BT

This monstrous sunfish washed up on a beach in Puponga, New Zealand.

The use of robots around the home to mow lawns, vacuum floors and manage other chores will increase sevenfold by 2007 as more consumers snap up smart machines, the United Nations said.

We all know what Mayhem Online's vibrating Massage Pen (£8) is really for, but we'll let them carry on insisting it's for easing any "aches and pains accrued through the day". It even comes with a reflexology chart.

Or maybe it really is for giving a gentle temple massage and we should get our thoughts out of the gutters...

Mayhem

The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts funds cutting-edge technologies and concepts, some of them sound crazy but might eventually emerge in some future technical implementation.

One of these crazy-looking ideas is the spray-on spacesuit to replace NASA's 300-pound (136-kilogram) spacewalk suit which is fine in weightlessness, but just won't do for walking around Mars.

A layer of polymer fabric would be sprayed over an astronaut, in a booth like those for getting a spray-on suntan. The "bio-suit" could be augmented by temperature-control underwear, flexible joint attachments and perhaps even an exoskeleton.

Via MSNBC.
More details in the PDF report.

The Object-Based Media group at the MIT is developing a revolutionary system of computerised fabric patches called BYOB (see the PDF of "Build Your Own Bag".) Each patch contains a functional unit made of a microprocessor and memory plus either a radio transceiver, a sensor, a microphone, batteries or a display.
The patches are joined with a modified Velcro enabling electrical and physical connections.

The patches can be assembled to create a variety of information-providing or environment-sensing objects according to the way you put them together. The square and triangular patches allow you to fashion, and refashion, objects such as bags, belts, curtains or scarves.

The patches also allow you to swap modules and use the system for many functions. For example, the researchers have made a bag that prevents people forgetting things. A unit is programmed to listen for signals from RFID tags on objects. If it does not detect a required item, the bag uses a voice synthesiser module in another patch to warn: "Cellphone, yes! Wallet, yes! Keys, no!"

A Bluetooth chip will be added so it can connect to the internet and automatically download weather reports. Then it would only speak up if you forgot your umbrella and it was raining. With such add-ons, the system can be upgraded by simply snapping on new sensors. "People would add functionality to their bag, just as they download ring tones for their phones today."

Via Eurekalert.
Related: very smart bags.

Light-sensitive bacteriorhodopsin is combined with electronics to make the world's first bio-phototransceiver.

Scientists from the US and Hungary say they have blended the protein bacteriorhodopsin (bR) with electronics to make the world's first bio-phototransceiver. The device, which uses bR to detect incoming light, could find applications as an optical interconnect in artificial vision systems for robotics and high-speed tracking.

Instead of 100,000 genes, the initial estimate, scientists working on the Human Genome Project, a publicly funded collaboration of scientists from 20 institutions in the United States, Europe and Asia, have reduced the number to 20,000-25,000.

A German man who earlier this year tried to have Santa Claus banned, says he has a device that can straighten bananas. He told German newspaper Bild: "This is the biggest thing since sliced bread - the straight banana."

Psychiatrists at Harvard are testing the "Memory Pill", a new drug to erase bad memories.

Harvard researchers are targeting in particular memories that cause Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a mental condition that can generate panic attacks, increased heart rate and crippling fear.

When a person experiences a traumatic event, the body releases adrenaline, a stress hormone that makes you, say, run from an aggressor. But that same adrenaline has also the ability to strengthen your memory.

Pitman has been experimenting with propranolol, a drug commonly used to treat hypertension that blocks the action of adrenaline and noradrenaline. "We figured we could give people this propranolol to affect the memory before it gets laid down," he explains. He adds that the drug doesn’t cause people to remember things differently, just less strongly, "We would say it would more approximate a normal memory."

Not everyone welcomes the pill. Gina Scaramella, who works at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, says it's important for women to feel in control when they are recovering from a sexual assault, and taking propranolol means giving up control over their memories. Then, anyone who took that medicine could be in trouble in a legal case, since defense lawyers may say that the victim was so unstable that she needed drugs to cope, or that the propranolol may have altered her memory about the assault. Other ethicists say the pill may erase the rage that victims will need to go on and prosecute their attackers.

Via La Repubblica.
ACF News source for information in english. Pic from Harvard University Gazette.

A few months ago, we talked about body extensions, as well as some historical precedents for prosthesis. We thought we would add in a few more interesting developments that are changing the concept of artificial limbs and the permanence of disability. And giving designers some fantastic opportunities to develop the next bionic man concepts.

We’re not quite sure who Koss is (or rather, was) marketing these headphones to besides maybe Green Bay fans to wear with their foam cheesehead hats, but if you want a set of KSC19 Cheese headphones, it’s gonna set you back 25 bones. We’re half tempted to get a pair just for the can they come packaged in, but we’re probably going to hold out until they release a Jarlsberg version.

An article in New Scientist identifies what might be a new sexual identity: Asexuality. There's no formal definition for what it means to be asexual, but it can be loosely described as never having had any desire for any kind of sexual intimacy (different from having had sexual desires at one point and then losing them). The article estimates that about 10% of the population could identify itself as being asexual -- approximately the same number as those who identify as homosexual.

The Pentagon wants planes to start acting more like plants. That's the ultimate goal of a research project, funded by Darpa, the Defense Department's mad science division.

We all know plants change their shape. Some bend to catch the sun's rays; some snap to catch a meaty treat; some stiffen when they're watered. Darpa would like to have tough, man-made materials that can pull off some of the same tricks. Maybe, one day, it can lead to a jet that can pull back its wings when it's ready to attack, or extend 'em to glide.

Researchers at Virginia Tech have won from Darpa a $2.1 million, year-and-half grant to start to figure out ways to do this. "The plan calls for the investigation of the protein structures of plants for the purpose of understanding their role in generating shape changes in natural materials," says a Virginia Tech press release. "The protein structures under analysis would then be used to develop a synthetic material that incorporates properties that produce controllable shapes."

The project – Nastic Materials -- is part of a whole range of efforts by Darpa to make materials that act a little like living things. As John Main, the program's manager, said at a DarpaTech conference earlier this year:

The intersection of materials science and nature appears to show great promise for delivering materials with unobtainable properties.

Natural materials are truly magnificent: Living bones grow, repair damage, remodel to distribute stress, and produce blood. Muscle turns lipids into work to help us regulate body temperature, maintain balance, and walk. Plant tissues grow, distribute nutrients, isolate injury, self-clean, support leaves, and sometimes even move with surprising force, such as tree roots upending concrete sidewalks.

All of these characteristics are unobtainable [in man-made things] if you limit yourself to the world of conventional materials. Yet they are all clearly possible, because nature has supplied us with examples to study and potential paths to follow to create similar capabilities.

Following on Xeni's post below about neuroscientist VS Ramachandran, here's a link to Real Audio recordings of his excellent Reith Lectures from last year on the subject of the Emerging Mind. Lecture #4, Purple Numbers and Sharp Cheese, is a wonderful introduction to synesthesia.

i took a few perception classes in college with Ramachandran and really enjoyed them (except for the occasional heavy accent). he's the one who "invented" the cure for the phantom limb condition where amputees would still feel their missing arm or leg as if it was still there.

"The ability of some people to see the coloured auras of others has held an important place in folklore and mysticism throughout the ages. Although many people claiming to have such powers could be charlatans, it is also conceivable that others are born with a gift of synaesthesia. GW does not believe she has mystical powers and has no interest in the occult, but it is not hard to imagine how, in a different age or culture, such an interpretation could arise."

High Cools, I was told, had brains that lit up in response to cool objects. High Uncools reacted strongly to uncool objects; they're the snobby tastemakers. The last group, the Low Cools, was the one I feared. Low Cools had scans that came out almost entirely blank. It didn't matter whether they were looking at a picture of Michael Jackson or Mick Jagger. They were, in effect, cool-blind.

Theodore Berger , a biomedical engineer at the University of Southern California (Los Angeles), wants to understand nerve cells' language to build a computer chip that might one day bolster the brain's memory banks.

This brain prosthesis is a kind of implantable hippocampus (the hippocampus is a part of the brain involved in the formation of long-term memory.) The most immediate beneficiaries would be victims of stroke, Alzheimer's and other ailments. Others might one day use such a chip to bone up on French, quantum mechanics or an F-16 flight maneuver.

Click on the picture of the Hippocampus replacement to see it enlarged.

Berger has already devised computer programs that replicate the cells' behavior, and has built chips to run them. Earlier this year he successfully tested the system on tissue from rats' brains (kept alive in cerebrospinal fluid).

He hopes to test a chip in live rats within three years, then monkeys trained to carry out memory tasks. The researchers will stop part of the animal's hippocampus working and bypass it with the chip. "The real proof will be if the animal's behaviour changes or is maintained." Then of course, it will be the turn of humans.

As a journalist in New Scientist writes it is unclear whether we have any control over what we remember. If we do, would brain implants of the future force some people to remember things they would rather forget?

Via Newsweek.

A last year article in The Economist has more details.

Scientists are seeking permission to carry out experiments that would result in children being born with three biological parents. -Guardian

UK medical authorities say they will almost certainly approve the application in the next few weeks.

The aim of the technique is to prevent mothers passing on degenerative genetic diseases to their children. But campaigners say it could lead to significant increases in elderly women having children. They also claim it represents an unacceptable step towards the creation of designer babies.

'By creating a child with three genetic parents, these scientists are taking the first step towards genetic engineering of human beings. That is not a direction in which we should be going,' said Dr David King, director of Human Genetics Alert.

The technology - which is being developed by a team at Newcastle University - will involve the implanting of the nucleus of an embryo from an affected mother into an egg taken from a donor that has been stripped of its nucleus.

Artist and trained quantum physicist Julian Voss-Adreae creates wood and steel sculptures modeled after proteins. According to a writeup in Genome News Network, "the sculptures are based on proteins found in nature, and his models must meet two criteria: They have certain aesthetic qualities and are 'scientifically significant.'" GNN has several example sculptures, and more can be found at his eponymous website.

Lucy Dunne is working on the Massage Shirts project which look at "the relationship between personality and desire to conceal or display technology." Each of the three shirts contains the same technology, a set of small motors which provide a vibrating shoulder and back massage, but with different degrees of visual integration into the garment:

- the subtle betrays no visual evidence of embedded technology,
- the moderate one dislpays only a graphic allusion to embedded technology
- the overt (see below) clearly shows the small pods that massage the wearer.

Via personal debris who points also to Philips Research Feels good kimono woven with conductive threads that de-stress the wearer. A conductive embroidered spine at the back, disperses an electrostatic charge via the fibres of the garment to create a tingling sensation. Inside the pocket, a remote device with settings allows to regulate the level of relaxation. Biometric sensors monitor the degree of relaxation and adjust the level of sensory stimulation accordingly.

Two years ago, Italian fashion designer Alexandra Fede created the JoyDress which uses a network of flexible pads to give a soothing massage. A button of the electronic control unit enable the wearer to pre-plan the timing and strength of the massage.

For massage in a scarf, see the Pod-Massager by Farrah Sit.
There's also the full body vibrating coat of Kelly Heaton.

P.S. Just because I actually bought them, believing they would annihilate my cellulite (I'm ready to try anything with "No cellulite" written on), I'll mention the many versions of massaging pants that promise to leave you with fat-free thights. Of course, they do not work.

Northwestern scientists have been studying false memories, which lie at the center of a variety of societal disputes, including the validity of repressed memories from traumatic events, as well as ordinary testimony in a criminal trial. Using MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) technology, the researchers are trying to understand how it is possible to form a "memory" of an event that didn't actually happen.

What they found is that a vividly imagined event can leave a memory trace in the brain that is similar to that of a real event. Some of the same brain areas are used whether an object or event is actually perceived or only imagined.

Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Health / Science / Biologist tries to steer a shark, nose first:
Funded by - who else - DARPA, Jelle Atema is working on creating a cyborg shark.

"Jelle Atema wants to understand a shark's brain well enough to take it over -- to get it to obey commands to smell and sense what's going on in the water around it.

'I want to sit here in my office, call up Charlie Shark out in Hawaii, and say, "Go follow that wake,"' said Atema, who splits his time between Boston University and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. Ultimately, he said, a shark could help the military by surveying hard-to-reach areas for dangerous chemicals or other hazards."

Study: Brain battles itself over short-term rewards, long-term goals
Implications range from economic theory to addiction research
You walk into a room and spy a plate of doughnuts dripping with chocolate frosting. But wait: You were saving your sweets allotment for a party later today. If it feels like one part of your brain is battling another, it probably is, according to a newly published study.

Researchers at four universities found two areas of the brain that appear to compete for control over behavior when a person attempts to balance near-term rewards with long-term goals. The research involved imaging people's brains as they made choices between small but immediate rewards or larger awards that they would receive later. The study grew out of the emerging discipline of neuroeconomics, which investigates the mental and neural processes that drive economic decision-making.

continuted....

If successful, which the scientist says is probably years away, the experiment may yield a naturally decaffeinated brew that could have a richer and deeper taste than the decaf fare currently available.

The garment will automatically call emergency services when necessary, for example if the wearer suffers a cardiac arrest. This represents a considerable advance on the mobile phones which tell you when you're having a heart attack, as you don't have to hold the underwear in front of your heart for it to work. It also represents a step up from the current portable elctrocardiograms, as it does not require electrodes covered with electrolytic gel to be stuck to the wearer's skin. These can be uncomfortable if worn for long.

The device uses sensors woven into the fabric of the underwear. These detect electrical fluctuations on the skin, which are used to tell how rapidly and with what force the heart is beating. It also records activity and stress levels, both important factors in determining a person's risk of a heart attack. However, an obstacle for the developers is the need for software to distinguish between increased heart rates due to stress or physical activity.

link to the PDF document

Sleep medicine experts have successfully treated a rare case of a woman having sex with strangers while sleepwalking.

The behaviour had disrupted the lives of the woman and her partner. At night while asleep, the middle-aged sleepwalker - who lives in Australia and cannot be identified for reasons of confidentiality - left her house and had sexual intercourse with strangers. The behaviour continued for several months and the woman had no memory of her nocturnal activities.

Circumstantial evidence, such as condoms found scattered around the house, alerted the couple to the problem. On one occasion, her partner awoke to find her missing, went searching for her and found her engaged in the sex act.

Robot are more and more able to emulate humans and animals. The Humanoid Robotics Laboratory in Austria believes they lack a crucial characteristic: robots will be just robots if they are only our intelligent, cheap workers and adjutants. To get less boring robots should get mankind's most striking feature the pursuit of its own advantage.

So they made the Bar Bot, driven by self interest, its only aim is to drink beer. In order to achieve this goal in bars, it asks people for coins and spends them as soon as there is enough for a beer.

To reach its selfish objectives, it dependends on others: somebody has to give it coins or hand it a beer. This is where it engages in communication, in social interaction with human beings.

Video MPEG4 or Quicktime.

The aim for the Total Recall project is to design and develop a personal information management system which will securely collect, store, and disseminate data from a variety of personal sensors. It will also allow customizable searching, analysis, and querying of this data, in a secure manner. Numerous applications of such systems will play an important role in improving people's quality of life.

Yoel Fink and his team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology are studying how fabrics woven from light-sensitive fibres could be embedded in computer and projector screens, and control computers by tracking the position of laser pointers, or other light sources, on the screen.

The fibres respond to light because photons hitting the semiconductor core dislodge electric charges, affecting the voltage in the fibre’s metal wires. Current changes in a grid of such fibres can then pinpoint exactly where a light source is striking the surface.

Embedding these grids in computer screens would allow us to just take light beam and communicate with the computer because the screen would know where it was being hit. No more mechanical mouse requested!

Via New Scientist.

It helps convert sound waves into electrical impulses that the brain can understand.

"People have been looking for this protein for decades."

Increasing numbers of men in the Chinese city of Shanghai are reportedly opting for cosmetic surgery.

As women seek implants to increase their breast size, so men are seeking to boost their chest muscles, according to the Shanghai Daily. The paper said most of those seeking surgery wanted to impress women, clients or their bosses.

Cosmetic surgery is on the rise in China and the country is soon to hold a "Miss Plastic Surgery" beauty contest...

Lifix writes ""Harvard University scientists have asked the university’s ethical review board for permission to produce cloned human embryos for disease research, potentially becoming the first researchers in the nation to wade into a divisive area of study that has become a presidential campaign issue."

There’s an old myth that we only use 10 percent of our brains, but researchers at the University of Rochester have found in reality that roughly 80 percent of our cognitive power may be cranking away on tasks completely unknown to us. Curiously, this clandestine activity does not exist in the youngest brains, leading scientists to believe that the mysterious goings-on that absorb the majority of our minds are dedicated to subconsciously reprocessing our initial thoughts and experiences. The research, which has possible profound implications for our very basis of understanding reality, appears in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.
[...]
Weliky, in a bit of irony, set 12 ferrets watching the reality-stretching film The Matrix....

For the first time, plastic surgeons have reconstructed a burn victim’s entire face using a single sheet of thick skin harvested from his back. Unlike after conventional multiple grafts, the patient’s lips and eyes opened and closed properly and his skin looked smoother and more natural.

before + after photos:
 

Donatella Versace is in the midst of a lip collagen disaster. Her lips have blown up twice their original size, see the the photos below.

"Light painting is a technique in which light sources are projected or "painted" in selective areas during the camera exposure."

Dean Chamberlain is probably the most seasoned in "light painting". he's taken photography to a whole new level. each composition is phantasmagoric. check him out. also, Tokihiro Sato does a similar "light painting" technique but with a mirror. -BT

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the practice of injecting humans with tracking devices for medical purposes."Applied Digital,maker of the implantable VeriChip for humans,announced on Wednesday the FDA's approval of its technology,"zdnet reports."The computer chips, which are about the size of a grain of rice, are designed to be injected into the fatty tissue of the arm. Using a special scanner, doctors and other hospital staff can fetch information from the chips, such as the patient's identity, their blood type and the details of their condition, in order to speed treatment.The company is targeting the devices at patients suffering from Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other conditions requiring complex treatment",the article says.

FDA approves injecting ID chips in patients

We know what you’re thinking. Crazy flashing lights equals Pokemon-style seizures, but the Japanese scientists who have developed a method of communicating by flashing LED lights at extremely high rates that are faster than the human eye can possibly detect. They’re investigating it as an alternative to using radio waves for position detection (which they is way too inaccurate and theoretically their LED system is precise to within a few millimeters), and also for creating traffic signals which can beam information to your car.

"VitalSense proved to be a real lifesaver in a recent study of wildland firefighters in Montana. The study was designed to evaluate heat stress in high intensity work environments. Canadian coaches used VitalSense to evaluate the physiological status of Canadian triathletes training for all three legs (swimming, biking and running) of their event in the 2004 summer Olympics. In another athletic related study, Nike® is using VitalSense to test heat dissipation in clothing."

Researchers have managed to grow this square bacterium in the laboratory for the first time. The square bacteria was first discovered twenty-five years ago near the ultra-salty Red Sea. To grow it in the lab, the scientists used a culture with the salt concentration of soy sauce. From an article in Nature:

The microbe is also extremely tolerant of magnesium chloride. According to (University of Groningen scientist Henk) Bolhuis, this makes it a model organism for studying what life might be like in extraterrestrial corners of the solar system, such as the magnesium-rich brines on Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede.

Funky Kitchri Couture from Alexander McQueen, especially the headgears. Click on more for additional images.

Alexander McQueen Official Website
Style: Alexander McQueen Fashion Show

The Technology Of Uselessness
by Critical Art Ensemble, 1994

"To expand on the suggestion of Georges Bataille, could the end of technological progress be neither apocalypse nor utopia, but simply uselessness? ...

Pure technology in this case would not be an active agent that benefits or hurts mankind: it could not be, as it has no function. Pure technology, as opposed to pure utility, is never turned on; it just sits, existing in and of itself. Unlike the machines of the utopians and dystopians, not only is it free of humanity, it is free of its own machine function - it serves no practical purpose for anyone or anything.

Where are these machines? They are everywhere - in the home, in the workplace, and even in places that can only be imagined. So many people have become so invested in seeing technology as a manifestation of value or anti-value, that they have failed to see that much of technology does nothing at all."

i just like the headline -BT

Italian geneticists may have explained how genes apparently linked to male homosexuality survive, despite gay men seldom having children. Their findings also undermine the theory of a single “gay gene”.

The researchers discovered that women tend to have more children when they inherit the same - as yet unidentified - genetic factors linked to homosexuality in men. This fertility boost more than compensates for the lack of offspring fathered by gay men, and keeps the “gay” genetic factors in circulation.

BreadMan writes "The Economist has an interesting article about how the use of GM (genetically modified) plants extends well beyond the food industry. Altered trees that make better paper, insect-resistant cotton, potatoes that contain the right kinds of starches. An interesting read to see where the industry is going in light of problems with having GM foods on the dinner table. There's more industrial uses for agricultural products than you'd think of right away, so this may be a lucrative use for GM technology."

The global map of atmospheric nitrogen dioxide pinpoints cities, burning vegetation and even shipping lanes

A father in central China has been refused permission to name his son '@'.

The dad wanted to name his son after keyboard character that appears in every email address, arguing it was now in common usage.

To celebrate its 150th anniversary, watch company Timex teamed up with Core77 for a design competition: Timex2154: THE FUTURE OF TIME that asked designers to explore and visualize personal and portable timekeeping 150 years into the future.

The winner of the wearable category, is Alexey Koptev's Sticker Watches which come on a roll, with perforations. Each sticker includes a timer, clock, and calendar: you just tear off a watch and stick it anywhere.

It didn't win but was my favourite in the wrist-based category, the Xemit bracelet of Aleksei Mikhailov has twisting arms that project two rays of light onto the wearer’s wrist to represent the hands of a clock.

In the Notable section, there's Dan Harden's Skindiglo, a cream filled with nanobots, that you can apply anywhere on the body. The nanobots can receive voice commands and wireless information (such as broadcast time) and then arrange themselves in the form of a clock, a calendar, or any image the user desires, right there on the surface of the skin. It wears off naturally and is replaced whenever the user wishes.

There are many many more concept products and I really cannot figure out how the jury managed to choose between so many truly original ideas.

Via 21f.

yeah, i noticed that there were tons of sticker watches but i think the reason they chose the one they did is because it came on a roll and emphasized the disposableness and cheapness that a watch can be. -BT

there was an electronic tongue reported in Wired back in 1998, which was also in the excellent docu "Beyond Human Senses" which is still on sale for $5.99 :-) -BT

Researchers at University of Warwick, England, have created an electronic tongue able to identify the four basic tastes: sour, sweet, salt and bitter.

"Electronic tongues are likely to find use in food and clinical labs especially for testing of bitter or obnoxious substances such as urine," said electric sensor researcher Anil Deisingh of the University of the West Indies in Trinidad & Tobago.

Electronic Taster

Instead of having chemical membranes like human tastebuds, the new tongue doesn't taste at all — it hollers and listens.

Using sound waves crossing the surface of a crystal, the sensor rattles whatever liquid is being tasted and observes how the fluids respond. It turns out that different-tasting fluids respond to the rattling in signature ways.
Each fluid changes the sound wave differently, creating a distinguishable taste signal.

The device is unique among experimental electrical tongues because it uses physical, rather than electrical or chemical, features of substances to detect taste.

The miniature electronic tongues someday might be used at dairies, in beverage and pharmaceutical industries, to monitor water quality, and in biomedical labs.

Via Discovery Channel.

Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr at the Tissue Culture & Art Project are attempting to grow a semi-living jacket made of "victimless leather." Living tissue are grown into a leather-like miniature coat.

Using a biodegradable polymer as a base, the duo coated it with 3T3 mouse cells to form connective tissue and topped it up with human bone cells to create a stronger layer of skin. The jacket is being grown inside a bioreactor that acts as a surrogate body. Once the polymer degrades, a jacket that maintains its shape and integrity should be "fashioned."

They are also designing a MetaBody, a semi-living object consisting of different tissues from different bodies and will team up with French performance artist Orlan, to culture her own skin and hybridize it with skins of different pigmentation from other people of different races to create a miniature Harlequin dress, abolishing identities of individuals, genders, races and species.

And they'll be growing facial parts for Stelarc, an Australian artist who explores extending the body through prosthetics. They want to grow a nose, lips and a shape of the eyes, connecting them to form a living mask that would either imitate a face or represent a mutation of it.

Via Wired.

Technology Review reports that MIT Professor Leonard Guarente may have found the genetic factor that allows mice undergoing 'caloric restriction' to live up to 30% longer. It's long been known that cutting down food intake by about 1/3 can extend the lifespan of mammals by up to 50%. Professor Guarente has found that manipulating a single gene -- the SIRT1 gene -- can produce longer mice lives without caloric restriction. What's more, all mammals -- including humans -- have a similar gene.

A 30% longer healthy life -- another 25-30 years, say -- is intriguing, and is on the cusp of being worldchanging. As Alex has noted in the past, a population that regularly lives to (and beyond) the age of 100 forces us to confront questions about work, relationships, family and our society in general. But living to 100, even 140, may be just the tip of the iceberg. What happens when we figure out a way to live much longer lives? Read on for an exploration of this question.

The NY Times profiles the industrial designer Inga Sempé.

Penis shaped chicken nugget, IT DOESNT GET ANY BETTER
US $7.50
One chicken nugget/finger from ---- in the box
This thing looks dead on like a penis, with balls included
Very rare indeed, very seldomly does one come by such a rare food find
This nugget is on ice, and will be shipped to ensure freshness and quality
A great item to get some good laughs, buy the nugget thousands have seen.

alito writes "15 years ago they couldn't get them to walk, now they are rollerskating (video). Read more about the 2004 Intelligent Robotics and Systems conference in this New Scientist article, and at the conference's site. Also shown at IROS, a childbirth simulator for obstetricians, a capsule that crawls through your intestines, and a 3-mm long swimming robot. (No, I don't get paid by New Scientist.)"

check out the sumo-wrestling qrio robot video too -BT

Nicolas Nova's blog points us to MetPhoMod: the METeorology and atmospheric PHOtochemistry mesoscale MODel project (and don't blame me for the funky capitalization, that's what they use) in Switzerland. MetPhoMod is a 3D visualization tool for modeling meteorology and atmospheric chemistry -- that is, smog. MetPhoMod was used to study pollution patterns in Europe in the late 1990s, with a particular focus on the air chemistry over Grenoble and over the Swiss canton of Obwalden. The illustration at right is from work done in 1996 looking at smog patterns in Athens.

What makes this application interesting is the fact that it's free software, under a GPL license. The source code (as well as binaries for Solaris, AIX, Linux and Windows) can be found on the download page. A set of test data as well as data from a 1993 Swiss Plateau study are also available. The technical reference explains the theory and math behind the latest version of the app. MetPhoMod is complex stuff, clearly not meant for casual play, but I'm always happy to see these sorts of simulations made more widely available.

Sargent Rehabilitation Center in Warwick is testing a device designed to increase the independence of individuals with quadriplegia.

In the study, a patient who is unable to use his hands or arms due to a spinal cord injury was able to both control a computer cursor and perform useful tasks, using his thoughts and the Cyberkinetics ' BrainGate Neural Interface System.

The System converts neural signals into an output signal under the person's own control.

After having been implanted the sensor portion of the BrainGate on the surface of the brain where thoughts of hand and arm movement originate, the first participant in the study, Mr. Matthew Nagle, saw his life changing. In the past few weeks, he has been able to control his TV using a computer cursor that moves with his thoughts.

The ongoing pilot study will enroll up to five individuals who are unable to use the arms and legs. At the end of the study, each patient will undergo another surgery to have the device removed or may have the option to participate in future studies.

Via Providence Business News.

Philip Kennedy was the first to successfully allow a quadriplegic to use a computer and communicate with it by just using his thoughts. he was featured in the documentary Beyond Human Senses, which i highly recommend and the VHS is on sale for $5.99 right now at the discovery channel store. -BT

NTT demoed their human body data transmission technology at CEATEC JAPAN 2004.

The technology detects weak electric fields in a human body by using an optical electric field sensor and provides the data communication speed of about 10Mbps (much faster than 3.7Kbps, the speed Matsushita human data transmission enables.) The system also uses the TCP/IP protocol, making a human body equivalent to 10Mbps ethernet.

However, unlike Matsushita's technology that is ready for commercial use, NTT's technology may need some work before it can be commercialized.
It works as follows:

You step on a copper platform containing a server computer and hold a computing device, then data are sent from the server through your body to the computing device. For example, you can view streaming video transmitted through you body on your handheld device.

Via RFID in Japan < IT Media.

Fluorescence spectroscopy detects chemicals in the skin that relate to diabetes.

At MIT last week, Ray Kurzweil described a future in which he's convinced immortality -- or a drastically longer life span -- will be possible thanks to emerging technologies.

His new book, coauthored with Terry Grossman, M.D., "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever," outlines a special "longevity program" of diet, exercise and nutritional supplements .

"I really do believe it is feasible to slow down the aging process," Kurzweil told the MIT Emerging Technologies Conference. He said he believes science will develop therapies to stop and even reverse aging within 10 to 20 years, thanks to advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology.

He described three stages or "bridges" on the road to radical life extension.....

he takes 250 supplements a day!

Corals are the only animals in the ocean that build permanent solid structures which impede them to run away from diseases or pollution.
But they are especially sensitive to both as they are plants as well as animals.
"They're very simple animals. They're an animal that's basically a gut with a ring of tentacles around it," says Marine biologist Tom Goreau. "They're plants because in the cells of the coral they have symbiotic algae living inside and those things photosynthesise."

The algae in the coral tissue bleaches then dies if the coral encounters stress.

But Dr Goreau has teamed up with professor Wolf Hilbertz who has developed something he calls "sea-creation" which can mimic the natural process that corals use to grow their skeletons.

He puts a low voltage current through seawater. The current draws out the minerals, which essentially constitute limestone. Hilbertz also made "coral arks", made of welded steel bars that he sinks to the sea floor, and then supplies a current. Quite rapidly, limestone grows on the steel and live corals can be grafted on to the structure. They survive pollution and high sea temperatures, as long as the electricity stays on. The current takes care of growing a coral's skeleton which frees the animal up to fight off diseases or other stresses.

Via BBC News.
Credit photo: Wolf Hilbertz / www.globalcoral.org.

Trends and technologies in sex selection.

"MicroSort technology tags sperm bearing X chromosomes (those which determine females) and sperm bearing Y chromosomes (those which determine males) with a fluorescent dye so that they can be segregated into different batches. The dye harmlessly attaches to the DNA molecules that make up genes. Female-determining X chromosomes are much bigger than male-determining Y chromosomes, which means that human sperm carrying X chromosomes have 2.8 percent more DNA than do sperm with Y chromosomes."

(via)

Michael Kuehn asked artists, architects and designers to "think of things the world has never seen". He now sells them the art shop "Sin-Berlin.“

Items range from Chanel hand grenades, device that allows customers to scan in their body parts and create handbags that fit the shape of their breasts, bums and stomachs, designer clothes with sewn-in hangers meant to be put in the wardrobe and admired - not worn and this nifty Chanel tampon complete with gold chain.

Sin-Berlin, Friedrichstraße, 134, Berlin.

Ananova.

It swallows, breathes, salivates and knocks back fizzy drinks like there is no tomorrow. It is the latest weapon in food chemistry: the artificial throat.

According to a report by Creative Loafing, a federal agency, part of the Department of Transportation, is planning a monitoring program that would let the government track every vehicle on the road by using onboard transceivers.

"The only way for people to evade the national transportation tracking system they're creating will be to travel on foot. Drive your car, and your every movement could be recorded and archived. The federal government will know the exact route you drove to work, how many times you braked along the way, the precise moment you arrived – and that every other Tuesday you opt to ride the bus."

The system will rely on GPS technology and other methods to monitor every movement and archive it in massive databases for future use.

Transceivers, or "onboard units," will transmit data from each car to the system, the first models of which are expected to be unveiled next spring. By 2010, automakers hope to start installing them in cars. The goal is to equip 57 million vehicles by 2015.

World Net Daily, GIS Monitor.

Not only is Maggie in such need of exercize that she weights 9,120 pounds which is a lot even for an elephant, but she's also living in freezing Alaska.

The Zoo officials are talking with engineers and manufacturers about building Maggie her very own exercise equipment.

She'll have a threadmill and off-the ground feeding stations will be built so that the pachyderm will have to stretch for her food.

Maggie's 1,200-square-foot barn will also get better ventilation and a softer floor, perhaps rubber over the concrete.

I always thought that a zoo is a creepy place and this story just increase my feeling.

Via USA Today.

The amount of smoke in just one or two puffs of a cigarette can cause breaks in DNA and defects to a cell's chromosomes, leading to irreversible changes in genetic information being passed to a newly divided cell, according to University of Pittsburgh researchers.

Under the pretense of some project or another I asked Rod McLaren "If you lived in Archigram's Walking City, how would you spend your days?" and then did nothing with his wonderful response.

Thankfully Rod is not a loser like me, and he's posted it on his blog as Life in the Walking City. Check it out.

very cool shockwave zoom in of painted trippy worlds. - BT

As I opened the email I had a lateral vision of Bruce Sterling predicting the present in prankster mode. Here was my first biotech spam offering me DNA-Polymerases at a very special price. This was the text I got from the CEO of ATG biosynthetics:

"Dear Scientist,

we like to introduce to you ATG:biosynthetics GmbH, located in Germany and Canada. ATG offers bioproducts for research in life science as well as for related industries. In future in addition to our own products and services ATG will offer products and services of other biotech companies via our ATG:warehouse data base. Most frequently used enzymes in research today are DNA-Polymerases. We like to offer to you FIREPol, THERMIPol, and HOT FIREPol DNA-Polymerases an in addition Desoxyribonuclease I for a very special price".

My first reaction was that this was a new variant in the surreal tactics adopted by some porn spammer. But curiousity (which killed the genetically modified cat) grabbed me and I clicked through. Lo and behold! Instead of landing on a mutant online casino site, this actually looked kosher. I even googled up the CEO's CV. All authentic.

One question remained though: why is that having deciphered the building blocks of life, websites are still getting built with more twists than a helix?

That's what the world needs, a car that can write you a ticket. [fark]

IBM and United Arab Emirates University jointly developed a “smart box” telematics system that can warn drivers if they’re breaking the speed limit, record actions taken during an accident and even issue speeding tickets to offenders. The system combines cellular, GPS and voice recognition technologies to provide totalitarian control of the driving populus. Oh, and maybe games too.

It looks like a ghoulish Halloween trick. Yet the device, which projects a creepy green video image of a patient’s veins onto their skin, is about to go on trial in a US hospital. The idea is that it will help staff to pinpoint a suitable vein for an injection or a drip.
[...]
An array of near-infrared LEDs surrounding the camera’s lens illuminates the skin at a wavelength of 740 nanometres. This wavelength is strongly absorbed by blood, but is scattered by the surrounding tissue. “Fat and tissue look light, veins and blood look dark,” says Zeman.

The image from the camera is fed to a PC running imaging software that maps the image onto a bright green background in real time and boosts the contrast between the veins and surrounding tissue. The PC then feeds this image to a projector that beams it onto the skin.

David Pescovitz: My latest article for TheFeature is about the future of wireless sensors that can be implanted into your body, enabling your cell phone to act as a doctor in your pocket.

The human body is like a car. Take care of it, and it might even last a lifetime. If it has problems you may have to bring it to the mechanic, your doctor. Once you're there, though, the knocks and pings always seem to disappear, leaving you with a lot of explaining to do. Ideally, for treatment's sake anyway, your physician would follow you around and do an instant examination at the moment a symptom rears its ugly head. That's the idea behind UbiMon, a wireless sensor network of medical-monitoring devices that will eventually be implanted right into the body.

A research by market analysts Mintel could help forecast what a day in the basket of tomorrow's consumer could be.

The day would start with vitamins A, B1, B2, C, and niacin in a bowl of green tea cereal. The Nissin Cisco's Green Tea Cereal, available in Japan, is a rice-based cereal containing green tea powder, green tea extract, and gyokuro tea.

After that you'd want to have a try at a pack of toothpaste from Margaret Josefine in Japan which offers 31 different flavours including café au lait, Indian curry or pumpkin pudding flavours.

As a mid-morning snacks, Procter & Gamble's Pringle Prints have jokes and trivia questions printed directly on the crisps.

Such snacks could lead the way to a new range of products with information or messages printed on them.

If you're fed up with french dressing, why not try banana-flavoured mayonnaise on your salad? The Chungjungwon mayonnaise for kids from Daesang Food in South Korea is packaged in a bottle with a cap shaped like a duck's head and beak.

In the US, Nutri/System sells Aquascents Bottles which come with three plastic caps impregnated with different aromas. Add water to the bottle, screw on the cap, and depending on which cap you choose, you will think that the water is flavoured with lemon, peach, or berry.

Beauty foods, or cosmeceuticals, find their way into instant soups with Nissin Food Products' Biken Kenshoku new collagen soup, once again made in Japan. The company claims this soup contains 1000mg of collagen per serving.

Via Food Production Daily.

If you're hungry after this read, check Junk Food News

"HYPER-RUNTs raise uneasy questions pertaining to the nature of art in the realm of artificial life forms, media viruses, robot psychology, and inter-species cultures. They flirt with the possibility of a "post-human" future in which the paradigm of art and civilization gives way to a hyper-biology of emergent processes. A HYPER-RUNT might be seen as an ornery cultural lifeform, an élan vital, unexpectedly rearing its head in the turmoil brewing between artist, audience, technology, and ecosystem."

FROM LEARN'S "DAD": "Learn is the result of some initial work into review generation. I originally wrote a script that could go around sites placing automated reviews of certain products, but then I decided to try and turn it into a blogging robot. The blog entries don't read as well as the reviews it could create, but it's certainly fun. I would love to get into NLP a bit more, and this might provide the catalyst to do so."
FROM LEARN: "I dont mind sanitary towels. Read my lips!! Today I am studying your feelings your mojo and my mother and I also want to learn more about the state of sanitary towels!!!!!!!!"

A sticky substance secreted from glands on the back of two little-known species of burrowing Australian frog has been used to repair torn cartilage in the knees of sheep.

When pine cones fall from the trees, their scales open, allowing the seeds to be released. This is because these scales are made of two layers of fibers acting in different directions. Stealing this idea from nature, a team of U.K. researchers has designed a new material to make 'smart' clothing which adapts itself to changing temperatures. Like the scales of pine codes, this 'smart' material has two layers. The top one has small spikes, which open or close to let the outside air flow to cool you or to protect you. And as the second layer is waterproof, you should always feel comfortable wearing these clothes imitating nature. Prototypes will be shown next year at EXPO 2005, in Aichi, Japan. And you should be able to buy this kind of 'smart' clothes in a few years from now.

Here is a schematic representation of this new type of 'smart' clothing. When the outside temperature falls, the spikes close and the outside air is blocked. And when you get hot, the spikes open to let the outside air cool you. (Credit: University of Bath's Centre for Biomimetics)

Read more...

Cylar writes "CNN is reporting that Anheuser-Bush has developed a sweet, caffeinated beer they are dubbing B(E). Intended to compete with the trendy sweet concotions popular on the club scenes (such as Smirnoff Ice), it will contain caffeine, guarana, and ginseng." Not sure how I feel about ginseng in my brew, so I'll have to study this with a few cases.

(Reuters) - A elderly Romanian man mistook his penis for a chicken's neck, cut it off and his dog rushed up and ate it, the state Rompres news agency said Monday.

It said 67 year-old Constantin Mocanu, from a village near the southeastern town of Galati, rushed out into his yard in his underwear to kill a noisy chicken keeping him awake at night.

"I confused it with the chicken's neck," Mocanu, who was admitted to the emergency hospital in Galati, was quoted as saying. "I cut it ... and the dog rushed and ate it..."

The University of Chicago recently announced the installation of the most powerful human brain imaging system to date. While most fMRI systems in use today are powered 1.5-tesla or 3.0-telsa magnets, this new high resolution fMRI system has a 9.4-tesla magnet, built by GE Healthcare (a tesla is a large measuring unit of magnetic strength).

As I've mentioned many times, advances in neuroimaging are critically important in order to understand the workings of the human brain, detect diseases before their clinical signs appear, develop targeted drug therapies for illnesses and to provide a better understanding of learning disabilities. While I might not go as far as Dr. Keith Thulborn, director of the UIC Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, who claimed that this technological leap forward is as revolutionary to the medical community as the transition from radio to television was for society, I would suggest that this definitely a step toward our emerging neurosociety. Also, it looks like the neuroimaging group at University College London will now have some real competition.

the Medicine winner of the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize [via]

"It was rather disconcerting when the rubbish bin started humming furiously," she told the Herald Sun.

"We called security and next minute everybody was being evacuated while they checked it out."

A capsule designed to crawl though a patient's stomach, enabling doctors to view and even treat an internal ailment remotely, has been developed by an international research team.
[...]
Current endoscopies require a patient to swallow a capsule equipped with a camera that transmits images back outside the body. This enables a doctor to remotely examine the tract for potential problems. The capsule is passed through the patient's gastrointestinal tract by the motion of their digestive system.
[...]
The researchers have begun testing prototype legs walking through animal stomach tissue and have also developed a system for controlling the leg movement. Each leg is made from a shape memory alloy, which “remembers” its original shape and reverts back to it - much like a spring - each time a step is taken.

FROM BEV: Frei Otto is one of my all-time favorite architects, after Calatrava, that is :-).

a couple years ago, i went to see the mummified clown at the CIA in Los Angeles. it might still be there, if you want to see it. it's quite a spectacle. Summum Modern Mummification has been mummifying since 1975. for about $40K, you can mummify your cat or dog and place them in custom-designed mummiforms like this one. if you did that to a human loved one (likely to be over $100K), what would you do with their bodies? put it in your living room? a shrine? well, it seems like you still have to put them at the cemetary anyway: Summum recommends you be enshrined in a sanctuary/mausoleum or cemetery space that will prevent freezing and not get too warm. This may be accomplished with existing sanctuaries/mausoleums in memorial parks and cemeteries. my point is, i don't see the significance of mummification in this day and age unless you have a fetish for it. speaking of, check out their design for the "time capsule" mummiform. i think plastination is a better alternative for those who really want to preserve the bodies of their loved ones. at least you can actually see their bodies and not have to have it wrapped up like a mummy. perhaps it will be available in the future as a memorial process rather than just for research. still, i don't see any point in preserving dead bodies for memorial purposes. but based on the crazy things i've seen in the news where people have kept the decomposing bodies of their loved one in their house (like this one and this one), i think mummifying is definitely a better alternative over that!

UK angina patients are being offered Enhanced External Counterpulsation or EECP, a vibrating trousers treatment that works by increasing blood flow to the heart.

The treatment involves no surgery, drugs or needles. During each session, patient lies on a special bed and have the cuffs wrapped around the legs.
Similar to those used to measure blood pressure, the cuffs inflate and deflate with each heartbeat, pushing the blood up the leg towards the heart.

Dr Chris Morley, consultant cardiologist at the Yorkshire Clinic in Bradford says the results are remarkable: "We have now treated about 30 patients in the last 18 months and the results are not only beyond our expectations, a small number of patients have done so well their lives have been transformed."

From BBC Health.

Since the development in 1909 of the Heart Beauty, Japan's first domestically produced condom, Japan has, according to the men's weekly, led the world in the development of rubbers. And the Vicon, short for vibrator condom, the latest development the safe but saucy sex business has unsheathed, has proved to be a real humdinger, though it's currently available only in adult goods stores on a trial basis.

Vicon has two distinctive parts, the rubber prophylactic similar to any other standard condom with the exception that it has a hard plastic ring at the base, which holds the second part -- a tiny, spherical vibrator.

The vibrator is made of opaque plastic and contains a battery built inside. It starts moving and shaking at the flick of a switch. Ideally, it is placed at the foot of the stalk and is supposed to stimulate the most intimate parts of a woman's most intimate parts...

Paddy Hartley has created face corsets that alter the shape of the wearer's face. Through the corsets, the artist examines perceptions of beauty and alternative means of achieving the wearer's ideals of perfection.

The corsets have been developed with Ian Thompson from the tissue-engineering group at Imperial College London, whose research involves making and refining bioactive glass implants to reconstruct faces damaged by accidents or surgery. Bioactive glass has a very similar composition to bone, and its surface opens within hours of implantation, and allows tissue to grow into it.

Paddy, Ian and Andrew Bamji, an expert on the historical origins of facial reconstruction, will discuss during the Rearranging Face evening, which takes place on October 5 and marks the launch of a series of events at the Dana Centre (London) dedicated to exploring the future of face research. Attendants will be able to try on the face corsets, handle the bio-implants, watch footage of them in the making.

Lately, politics has managed to tangle just about everything including the Web. Politically charged copycat web sites have been cropping up, confusing zealous surfers.

There are four news sites named Al-Jazeera, though only one belongs to the controversial Qatar based television network (www.aljazeera.net). The others are: a Western parody of Al-Jazeera (misspelled www.aljazeeraa.com), a pro-Palestine Arab news source based in Dalton, Ga. (also misspelled www.aljazeerah.info) and a London publishing company whose readers have a penchant for Donald Rumsfeld (www.aljazeera.com).

continued at http://www.shanatinglipton.com/identitytheft.html

A microscopic swimming robot unveiled by Chinese scientists could eventually be used for drug delivery or to clear arteries in humans, say researchers.

Last year in late October, an unbelievable qigong stunt caught the world's attention. Three men dragged a truck loaded with 100 passengers a meter across a Taipei parking lot. While towing a meter isn't very far (even with a 10-ton load) the size didn't matter as much as the method. They pulled it with their penises.

A Spanish bar is implanting chips in customers to help keep tabs.