Cyborg

Future Vision

cagapakis — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 09:43:45 +0000

Future Vision

Beautiful 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.

cagapakis Fri, 04/22/2011 - 05:43

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Cyborg

design

future

Video

Vision

Control A Computer with Your Brain, And Look Good Doing It

cevans — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 12:49:23 +0000

Control A Computer with Your Brain, And Look Good Doing It

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It was his own off-the-shelf wearable computing system, a gordian thing connecting his outdated Windows smartphone to a pair of personal video glasses via an unwieldy battery pack in his shorts. He was trying to show it off an audience eager to learn about "DIY Wearable Computing." Unfortunately, it was like watching a third-grader thread his mittens through his winter jacket sleeves.

"Talk about first world problems," I heard him mutter.

His computer system-cum-outfit was shitty. It was shitty in the way that most things light-years ahead of their time are shitty, because the rush to make them into reality precludes aesthetics. People dedicated to developing new technolgies are largely interested in them working -- they can worry about looking good later. As a rule, technology is born ugly, then gets refined: compare the first Apple computers to the blemish-less glass of an iPad screen.

Wearable headset computers don't really exist to anyone but the people who actively wish for them; those people take matters into their own hands with Sharper Image and Made-in-China techno-junk. Such tangled-cable DIY cyborg hacks are entirely about function, and usually have no concern for design. That blind adherence to pragmatism may even be the defining characteristic of geek fashion. Technical sandals, video glasses, and LED-rigged shoelaces are functional and hideous, whereas fashion ("real" fashion, whatever that means) is beautiful and useless.

The point of this meandering introduction is that we are rapidly approaching an age where this general rule is no longer rock-solid. Consider the Emotiv EPOC. This is an actual, purchasable product: a "neuro-signal acquisition and processing wireless neuroheadset." When donned atop your dome, the headset's sensors tune into electric signals produced by your brain, effectively detecting your thoughts, feelings and expressions and allowing you to control a computer with your mind.

[Pause for effect]

This is the first commercially-available device of its kind. It is insanely ahead of its time. Have you ever even heard the word "neuroheadset" before?

And yet, the Emotiv EPOC neuroheadset is pretty beautiful. It's not an insane mess of multi-colored wires and scary-looking electrodes; it doesn't even have any wires at all -- it connects wirelessly to your computer via a USB dongle. All things considered, it looks more like an expensive pair of headphones than a device that can read your mind.

The EPOC has three different ways of sensing your mental intent. The simplest is that it can monitor facial expressions. This means you can smile and your computer will automatically insert a smiley-face into your chat, for example. It has a gyroscope in the headpiece as well, so you can move your cursor by moving your head. Lastly, it can sense brainwaves -- but to do that, you have to map the device to your particular mind by using crazy biofeedback software, concentrating on the idea of "left," "right," or "forward" (etc.) while looking at an orange 3D cube on your screen, while the EPOC analyzes your brain activity for each command. After this mapping is finished, EPOC users can ostensibly play Pong or Tetris telepathically.

As it turns out, however, the EPOC doesn't upset the beautiful-ugly, functional-useless dialectic much: the amount more beautiful it is than most first-generation technologies is about even with the amount less that it is functional. It's getting tepid reviews from realists, who argue that the EPOC is not the "mass market device for people looking for a turnkey telekinesis solution" that everyone hoped it might be. Rather, "it's an expensive toy for people to experiment with" and -- despite being totally cool -- is basically useless.

Regardless, the EPOC is catnip for nerds. If there had been one at Cyborg Camp, it would certainly have been the star of the show -- regardless of whether or not it was a nice-looking object. After all, sitting in the conference room at Cyborg Camp, my most prevalent thought wasn't about the disproportionate presence of dorky video glasses and technical sandals, but one of slightly apprehensive wonder: "shit, these people are the future of everything." In my mind, the clout of the future is not wealth, but ability to navigate an increasingly digital world (as Douglas Rushkoff says, "program or be programmed").

We'll probably all be wearing computers in five years. And just as Luxxotica is making personal 3D glasses for rich people and even Karl Lagerfeld compares Facebook to Brancusi, there will be high-end neuroheadsets being made and modeled at Paris Fashion Week by athletic models in circuit board stilettos.

Talk about first world problems, right?

cevans Wed, 11/17/2010 - 07:49

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Cyborg Noses

cagapakis — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 08:27:55 +0000

Cyborg Noses

A 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 the soft and squishy electrical flows of living systems to the hard electricity of computers, creating hybrid cyborgs that play to the different but compatible strengths of cells and computers. One emergent application of such technology is in the design of chemical sensors, connecting the amazing ability of cells to sense and respond to very small changes in the environment to a human-readable output on a computer screen or even to a robot that can move and seek out the source of a chemical.

An amazing recent paper from a Japanese research group shows how such a cyborg nose could work. The team worked with frog eggs, large and hardy cells that are relatively easy to manipulate one at a time, placing them into a specially designed chamber where the electrical state of the cell could be measured by a computer while different solutions flowed across the surface of the cell. However, egg cells can't "smell" on their own, they need to be engineered with receptors that can sense and respond to chemicals in the solution. To accomplish this, the researchers engineered the egg cells to express the smell receptors from various insects on their surface. Mammalian smell receptors activate a cascade of signals inside the cell that are difficult to measure without biochemistry, but insect smell receptors are much simpler, opening a channel through the membrane that rapidly changes the electrical state of the cell. Since the electrical potential is constantly being measured by the special chamber, when the right chemical binds to the receptor and opens the channel, the computer "sees" the smell.

Once the computer sees the chemicals, that signal can be translated into any other mechanical system. In a simple but awesome demonstration of the ability to connect the chemical biosensor to robots, the egg cell chamber was mounted into the nose of a robotic mannequin head. When the chemical was sensed, the robot shook its head from side to side. The cells are highly sensitive, able to sense very small chemical concentrations, and highly specific, able to distinguish between similar molecules with a high tolerance for noise.

Cells don't have to be computers to be able to do amazing things with computers. Biology has unique and powerful skills, and biologically inspired and biologically integrated engineering has great potential for all kinds of new cyborgs.

cagapakis Mon, 09/06/2010 - 04:27

Tags

electrical engineering

genetic engineering

olfaction

That insane I cant even begin to comprehend that a computer can "smell"

Bacterial Builders

cagapakis — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 07:05:41 +0000

Bacterial Builders

Check 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 Fri, 09/03/2010 - 03:05

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That is unbelievable awesome! Thanks for sharing!

These bacterium are, of course, part French, which, besides responding to their electromagnet-wielding masters, might also contribute to the high degree of co-ordinated flagellation.

The thing I found most intriguing was magnetosomes. Do these have properties that make them more versatile than just responding to electromagnetic influences -- and if so, do you try to use any of these in your own work?

I don't know a lot about magnetosomes, but I have a friend who is working on them. I'm hoping to do a little more reading for a post when his paper comes out so stay tuned :)

I've just discovered your blog... Wow, this is utterly amazing! I've never even heard of magnetosomes. Thanks!

Tiny Cyborgs

cagapakis — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:00:31 +0000

Tiny Cyborgs

Synthetic 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 examples of biomimetic robots, robots that have components built to resemble biological structures but made of non-biological materials. Joseph Ayer's group at Northeastern builds biomimetic underwater robots that look and act like lobsters or lampreys, that have electronic brains built to function the way that networks of neurons do in the brains of animals. Using complex signal processing they can swim around and follow different stimuli.

There are tons of amazing videos of other biomimetic robots on YouTube, like the RoboBees:

BigDog:

AquaPenguin:

None of these robots, however, use actual biological components (yet). Biological engineers and robot scientists are currently thinking of ways where the unique properties of living cells could be used as components in small robots. The Cyberplasm project aims to do just that.

In this fish-shaped robot, the eyes are made of synthetic biological sensors, engineered strains of yeast or bacteria that are able to sense chemicals in the water and send a signal to the electronic "brain." These electronic circuits then send signals to muscle cells engineered to respond to signals coming from an electronic "nerve" rather than a biological one, causing the fish to swim towards the chemical signal.

I have to admit that when I think about these robots sometimes I feel like I'm in that part of Terminator II when the skynet scientist are inadvertently setting the course for their own demise at the hands of killer robots, but at the same time I think they are just totally amazing and fascinating. These are hardly self-replicating murderous robots (they're hardly more than ideas at this point), and technology that incorporates biological systems that can do things more efficiently and with less energy than electronic or mechanical components can be enormously beneficial. Being able to create better interfaces between electronic and biological components may also help in designing better medical devices like pacemakers, brain stimulation devices for treatment of Parkinson's and other serious chronic neurological diseases, or devices that can monitor health and release drugs precisely when needed. They're also just plain cool.

cagapakis Wed, 03/17/2010 - 06:00

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Flight of the remote-controlled cyborg beetle

neurophilosophy — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:55:37 +0000

Flight of the remote-controlled cyborg beetle

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 Hirotaka Sato of the University of California, Berkeley, report the development of an implantable radio-controlled neural stimulating device, with which they demonstrate, for the very first time, the accurate control of flight in freely flying insects.

The miniaturized system developed by Sato and his colleagues is mounted onto the pronotum (the dorsal, or upper, plate of the exoskeleton), and consists of electrodes implanted into the brain and wing muscles. Flight commands to start and stop flight and control the insect's elevation and turning were generated on a personal computer running specialized software, and transmitted to a microcontroller which is equipped with a radio transceiver and powered by a microbattery.

The device is much simpler to program and use than similar ones developed previously, because it makes implicit use of the beetle's own flight control capabilities. The researchers found that flight could be initiated by simply applying a single pulse of electrical stimulation via the electrodes implanted into the left and right optic lobes. A single pulse from the same electrodes was also sufficient to stop the wing beats. Exactly how this occurs is unclear; it is known that visual inputs can initiate flight in locusts and fruit flies, and the researchers speculate that stimulation of the optic lobe activates large diameter "giant fibre" motor neurons which project from the brain to the wing muscles.

Once initiated, flight continued in the absence of further stimulation. The beetle powers its own flight, and levels with the horizon on its own, so that the neural and muscle stimulators are only used when a change in orientation or elevation is required. Turning could be initiated by asymmetrical stimulation of the muscles at the base of the wings, with a left turn being triggered by an electrical pulse to the right flight muscle, and vice versa. The stimulator could also be used to modulate the frequency of wing oscillations, which caused changes in altitude.

Electrically-controllable insects have obvious military applications. They could be used as micro air vehicles for reconnaissence missions, or as couriers which deliver small packages to locations that are not easily accessible to humans or terrestrial robots. The beetles used here (Mecynorrhina torquata) are among the largest of all insect species, and are capable of carrying addditional loads of up to 30% of their 8g body weight. But they could also be very useful to researchers who study insect mating behaviour, the foraging behaviour of insect predators, and flight dynamics and energetics.

Sato, H., et al (2009). Remote Radio Control of Insect Flight. Front. Integr. Neurosci. 3 (24). DOI: 10.3389/neuro.07.024.2009.

neurophilosophy Wed, 09/23/2009 - 09:55

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ClH3RK I want to say - thank you for this!

Haha you read this.

Wow thats crazy they can do this kind of stuff. Really the title lured me into this post and I found it quite entertaining. I think this concept was on a movie once and I remember saying "Ya right". I have been proved wrong.

First time I've seen that done on a beetle. I've seen it been done on a cockroach, bull and mouse. Well done.

Remote controlled insects: first step to mind control. I'll be on the look out for beetles with tiny cameras on the walls.

Somebody has copied your entire article, verbatim, to Live Leak, where at now has a higher Google ranking than your original work.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b96_1253940978&c=1#comments

You should totally file a DMCA complaint.

Thanks Nad. I've contacted them asking for it to be removed.

Okay, great, who's next?
Step right up!

I'll be on the look out for beetles with tiny cameras on the walls.

I want to say - thank you for this!

Cool stuff!

But wow, this new technology should do wonders for paranoid schizophrenics.

Not only are there satellites taking pictures of every portion of earth, now there's also bionic insects flying around watching our every move to worry about.

Maybe they're not so crazy after all...

--
http://noamgr.wordpress.com

A lovely study, although I'd imagine the military would be a little wary of using it without really understanding why it works. You stimulate the optic area and the insect moves, but you're not directly making it move, only indirectly. What if it turns out that it only works when the insect isn't (say) hungry and when it gets hungry it goes rogue? I guess you'd have to shoot it for desertion...

Phew. Good thing this technology will never, ever be abused.

Ever!

Steering Moths with Remote-Controlled Vemon Injecting Metabolism Regulators

bleimanb — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 22:35:34 +0000

Steering Moths with Remote-Controlled Vemon Injecting Metabolism Regulators

We'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 air pressure, wind speed, etc. Small air vehicles, however, can be greatly affected by a mere cough or someone opening a door. This sensitivity makes designing systems that control micro air vehicles an extremely complicated science. In an effort to skirt the starting from scratch approach, researchers are trying ways to convert insects into "premade" micro aircraft. Presumably the insects would already have the abilities to adjust for environmental changes, so if we can simply control the insect, then we wouldn't have to design systems to deal with environmental conditions; the insects would do that for us.

If any of that last paragraph makes sense to you, then please read on...Scientists Aram J. Chung and David Erickson are using a novel approach to controlling flying insects: injecting them with different amounts of various venoms in order to control their metabolisms which in turn could control their movements.

Why did you program me to feel pain?

Chung and Erickson implanted Tobacco hornworm pupae with microfluid devices. The devices inject the moths with different kinds of venom (insect, spider, and synthetic insecticides). The scientists then studied the different venoms' effects on the moths metabolisms and thus on their movements. Their experiment showed that they could indeed speed up or slow down the moths' using the venom. Presumably the different venoms could be used on one wing or another or the moth in whole in order to control its motion precisely.

Chung and Erickson then designed a new microfluid device, one that injected themselves with large amounts of alcohol in order to erase the memories and feelings of immorality associated with outfitting larval creatures with devices that inject them with different kinds of venom. It's a vicious cycle, really.

bleimanb Sat, 08/29/2009 - 18:35

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tobacco hornworm moth

CIA had a program of building miniature planes that weight only few grams, for eavesdropping. Eventually they had to scrap it because their models could not handle wind gusts. I suppose a remotely-controlled dragonfly is the next logical step.

Mothra is going to be *so* pissed.

Way unethical science. They should try injecting them with something nice that makes them fly faster, like amphetamine or something. I'm not sure if that's much better on the ethics stake, but at least the researchers might feel better about it.

Jeezlouise, I hope they're not using my taxpayer money for this.

Uh ... vemon?

Vemon, it's something like venom but more lethal.

That is HORRIBLE, cruel and irresponsible! Who funds these unethical projects? Better not be my tax dollars. I vote to cut funding immediately!

Plug your eyeball in and start filming

bioephemera — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:35:14 +0000

Plug your eyeball in and start filming

You'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 YouTube, via NextNature

bioephemera Thu, 03/12/2009 - 20:35

Tags

biology

Film, Video & Music

Web 2.0, New Media, and Gadgets

That's very cool!

This is just the beginning. Dig up a copy of William Gibson's novella Burning Chrome for a glimpse of what it will be like much further down the road.

Here's another practical substitute - a programmer in Finland lost a finger, and replaced it with a USB drive.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5005118/Compute…

Cyborg Insects

bleimanb — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:02:44 +0000

Cyborg Insects

Great video of humankind's future arch nemesis.

bleimanb Tue, 04/01/2008 - 06:02

Tags

Cyborg

insect

those are cool gadgets