Cyborg
cagapakis | April 22, 2011Beautiful video imagining the future of augmented, prosthetic sight, by Superflux for the Human+ exhibition:
Song of the Machine from Superflux on Vimeo.
You can read more about the science behind retinal prosthetics in a great article in the Guardian by one of the project collaborators, Dr. Patrick Degenaar.
cevans | November 17, 2010
A few months ago, I attended Cyborg Camp in my hometown of Portland, Oregon. Cyborg Camp is an "unconference," basically a room full of cyberpunks, mega-nerds, and aspirational coders that gather in an office building to talk about the "future of the relationship between humans and technology." This event deserves a separate entry, but for now I'd like to recall a particularly evocative thing: that the most heartbreaking thing I saw at Cyborg Camp was an adult man hopelessly tangled in a web of cables.
It was his own off-the-shelf wearable computing system, a gordian thing connecting his…
cagapakis | September 6, 2010A lot of synthetic biology is about getting biology to be more like electrical engineering, designing genetic "logic gates" to create a living circuit board. Beyond analogies, however, cells have many fascinating electrical properties--proteins that transfer electrons like wires, membranes that separate ions and create an electrical charge that drives the metabolism of the cell, channels through these membranes that open and close to activate an electro-biological response. Electrons are electrons whether they are in proteins or copper wires, and many scientists have designed ways to connect…
cagapakis | September 3, 2010Check out this awesome video of a computer-controlled swarm of magnetic bacteria building a pyramid out of tiny bricks!!!
From IEEE Spectrum, via It Takes 30, the always fascinating blog from Harvard Systems Biology, the department my lab is in!
cagapakis | March 17, 2010Synthetic biology deliberately equates genetic networks to electronic circuits, cells to machines, organisms to factories. In synthetic biology, every living can be thought of as a cyborg, a living machine that can be manipulated, changed to meet our needs, parts swapped in and out like a computer. Some projects in synthetic biology and biologically inspired engineering hope to bring the analogy a step further, combining biological and actual electronic and mechanical components into a single engineered unit, with the goal of essentially making tiny autonomous cyborgs.
There are a lot of…
neurophilosophy | September 23, 2009
REMOTE-CONTROLLED insects may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but they have already been under development for some time now. In 2006, for example, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA, the Pentagon's research and development branch) launched the Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems program, whose ultimate aim is to turn insects into unmanned aerial vehicles.
Such projects provide proof of principle, but have met with limited success. Until now, that is. In the open access journal Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, a team of electrical engineers led by…
bleimanb | August 29, 2009We've all seen articles detailing remote controling insects via electric pulse systems on their nervous centers. A paper that we uncovered from last year (thanks NVDH), however, details the beginnings of a new kind of remote controlled moth. Hold on to your hats, because this is about to get complicated.
Basically, it all started when aeronautic engineers started looking closely at "insect inspired micro aircraft" as a complement to the large air vehicles that we currently employ. Large vehicles such as planes and helicopters are so massive that they are only minutely affected by changes in…
bioephemera | March 12, 2009You've probably heard about the man with the eyeball camera. Here's the most detailed (and sometimes graphic) video I've yet seen about documentary filmmaker Rob Spence (aka Eyeborg), who is working on getting his prosthetic eye replaced with a wireless eye socket camera:
I first encountered Spence in this writeup at Wired last fall. According to the new video, they've hit a few snags since then, but for some reason Spence is all over the news right now. And it's a safe bet he'll continue to be, if he becomes the first cyborg reporter with a bionic eyecamera!
More: a briefer AP video on…